This technology works by increasing the resolution of the bits coded onto the CD, so that the zeros are rounder, and the ones have the little tip at the top, and a flat line along the bottom.
But seriously... How about we improve CDs by setting a standard that eliminates harsh audio compression, and sets limits on the audio leveling..?
What led to WW2 wasn't simply the emerge of Hitler.
Very true. Sometimes I wonder if Hitler wasn't ultimately in our favor... Perhaps if he hadn't risen to power, someone more competent would have come along.
I've found that abstract names work well in small companies, where servers tend to handle a lot of different roles and are often moved or re-purposed.
For larger companies where most machines are single tasked and configuration management is in place, it makes more sense to name based on the machine's role. For example: sf-corp-web-01 will be kickstarted and given a new name before it becomes a corporate quake... Uh... I mean mail, server.
Beyond that, they are basing their figure on the number of papers withdrawn due to an error . That would imply that the errors were noticed by other scientists and corrected. Given the amount of interest the LHC project is generating, I think it's safe to assume that the risk analysis has survived the test of massive peer review.
So the real question is: how many papers have been massively peer reviewed without anyone noticing major errors? I suspect that figure doesn't exist, and yet I'm sure it's much lower than the numbers quoted here.
This is actually rather obvious. If Jimbo tells you that there's a 1% chance that your tire will go flat if you don't fix it, that's not 1% if Jimbo is wrong 50% of the time. At best, it's 50.5%. Or something like that.
Okay seriously?
The probability that Jimbo is wrong is unrelated to the probability of your tire failing. If jimbo says that you have a 1% chance of your tire failing, but there's a 50% chance that jimbo is wrong we can reach the following conclusion: There is a 50% chance that your tire has a 1% chance of failing. There is a 50% chance that your tire has some other probability of failing. Some other probability of failing includes values such as 0%,.5%, and 2%. It also includes a 100% probability of your tire failing.
However, we have to assume that Jim isn't pulling the 1% figure out of his ass. If your tire was 100% likely to fail, we can still assume that Jim based his statement on a reasonable analysis. Perhaps Jim didn't notice a nail in your tire, but without knowing the quality of Jim's inspection of your tire, or without having access information Jim doesn't have, it's hard to say that he has a 50% chance of being wrong.
Finally, in some cases a professional will include a certain amount of leeway in his figure. Chances are, Jim fully inspected the tire and doesn't see any reason why it would fail prematurely. Chances are, that 1% is left as wiggle room in case of invisible manufacturing defect or a mistake in his evaluation. In this case, Jim has already factored into his evaluation the chances that he's incorrect.
There's a huge difference between criticism and ridicule. To be frank, most of us went through that kind of stuff growing up. Very few of us turned out anti-social.
In my experience, the difficulty of older games wasn't purely about difficulty, it was about making a small amount of content entertaining for a long time.
I'm a fan of older Super NES games. Going back with a modern emulator, such as SNES9x is a very interesting experience. The emulator not only allows you to save state, but also to fast-forward through boring parts, or rewind slightly, to just before a fatal mistake.
In my experience, when dieing and grinding are eliminated, most older games are surprisingly short. Many old shooters can be completed in the course of an hour or so. RPGs may take longer, but not nearly the 80 hours they used to consume back in the day.
Modern games can eliminate the grind thanks to the vast amounts of content. Completing half-life 2 takes nearly 4 hours when played straight through, with minimal deaths or saving and loading. The entertainment factor in modern games is about the environments, obstacles, and stories. It's about a good twitch, rather than the pleasure of overcoming an extreme challenge (Contra 1?)
But, if you ease environmental and employment regulations enough to compete like China, we'll end up being like China: massive pollution, unlivable wages, and the destruction of the American dream. Personally, I'd rather not see that happen.
America is a MAJOR consumer of Chinese products. Our leverage exists in the ability to set import restrictions designed to give American industry the ability to compete domestically.
Hell, you don't even have to use a tariff. Simply set limits on the prices the Chinese are allowed to sell their products for.
"We aren't going to charge a tariff. You just have to charge the same price for your products as domestic producers. What you do with that money is up to you. We suggest you pay your workers."
I recently returned from a business trip in London. While I was there, I learned that the roads were narrow. In many cases, traffic was traveling both directions on a road no larger than a single lane. Drivers would quickly swerve out of the way for oncoming traffic. As someone who commutes on a motorcycle, sharing lanes at high speeds, and enjoys his time on a race track, I found the thought of driving in London very intimidating. And yet, the actual rate of accidents didn't seem to be much different than here in the US.
I've found that drivers all generally accept a certain amount of risk. For every increase in perceived safety, you see a corresponding increase in risk taking.
How often do you edit a single byte without updating the rest of the block? How often do you write period? And, what difference does it make weather you burned out a single byte within a block, or the entire block?
Furthermore, wear leveling should keep this from burning out a specific block on the device: every time the block is re-written, it goes on a different part of the disk.
Wear leveling is handled at the firmware level, and should be transparent to the application. There's no reason it should cause issues any more than RAID, error correction or sector re-mapping causes issues on current hard drives.
So, is a billion 10 to the 9th power (AKA a short billion, or modern billion?) or is it 10 to the 12th power (AKA: a million millions, long billion, or old English billion?)
A megabyte was defined as 2 to the 30th power because computer addresses are based on the number two. That's why addresses are typically written in hexadecimal, or octal. Measuring IT numbers this way is still extremely useful.
By attempting to re-define 'Megabyte' in a way that is more convenient to yourself, you only serve to confuse matters for everyone else. Yes, it sometimes takes a moment to explain the issue to the un-initiated, but they can typically get it. Re-defining the meaning confuses everyone unless everyone simultaneously agrees on the new meaning.
It's worth noteing, that computational sizes are very clearly separated from SI units. If you say Kilobyte, it's very clear that you're not speaking about the same unit of measurement as a Kilogram, or any other SI unit.
You know... I can fight with my hands and feet. I can fight with a knife, or a sword, or a stick, or a staff, or a bow, or a gun. Yet, I haven't been in a fight since I was 14.
You make it sound like the only options are either aggression, or appeasement. There's a lot of grey area.
Setting the value of preventative maintenance is easy. Take the amount of downtime you would expect without your services. Subtract the amount of downtime you typically experience. Now, take the average salary for every person employed at your company that relies on your IT infrastructure. Multiply that by the number of people who rely on your infrastructure. Repeat the same project by how much your work improves employee efficiency. If your optimizations improve productivity for each employee by 5%, you've just paid your salary in any company with 20 or more people. That's how much your worth.
For example. An unmaintained network might experience two days downtime in the course of a quarter. Add to that the cost of bringing in a consultant (say, $150-$300 an hour for 10 hours) to fix it. If you have 20 people relying on your network, and the average salary is $30 an hour, you're saving $6300 a quarter on top of the efficiency improvements.
Maybe you help the CEO with his printer. If you save him an hour of time, how much are you saving the company?
The key to evaluating your worth to the organization is to keep in mind what other people's time is worth. It's easy to justify yourself in that way.
Every time I hear people throw out the 'S' word, I cry a little inside. The democrats are NOT liberal. They are at best moderate. Opposing one of the most conservative parties in the country would only make them liberal in a monochrome world.
Democrats and Obama are the party of the center.
Go to England, France, or pretty much any other socially progressive country for a comparison. Ask where they place him in the scheme of things, and you're likely to hear "he's a moderate." Then compare that country to a socialist nation, such as it existed in communist Russia, (where government service socializes YOU.)
I have been in London on business over the past two weeks. As a man with a very California look, and a very American accent, I clearly stand out. For the most part, everyone I've talked to has been very comfortable, and very friendly with me.
I did though, have a chance to speak to an English customs officer as I attempted to re-enter the country aboard the Eurostar. After requesting that I filled out another of the European visitors, I had a chance to ask her what she thought of Americans. I said that I heard we had a bad reputation, but that I was trying to do my part to improve it.
Her response was: "Well, the reputation is well earned." She smiled. "And you are doing your part. You seem really nice."
You're talking about a lady who sees Americans coming back and forth every day across the boarder.
Fact is, it's easy to write off other people's attitudes towards yourself. But usually, if you have a bad reputation, you've done something to earn it. And ultimately, it's well and good to believe we're the strongest nation on earth, but we aren't. And right now, our position in the world is rapidly declining. When you need the help of friends, it's good to have them.
I think our electoral system disagrees with you. There is never a consensus, but there is always a decision. Once a decision is made, it's made and everyone is expected up to abide by it. We ended up with bush, even though he only had a slim majority of the vote. That system tends to work better than the one we tried in 1861.
The federal government makes decisions for the entire united states, but it leaves more focused policy up to increasingly small geographic ruling bodies. The state makes state policy, the county makes county policy, the town makes town policy, and individual boards within the towns make even more specialized local policy. For example: the President of the united states of America DID NOT decision as to weather or not to hire a new gardener for our local park and recreation district. That was left to the local park and rec board. The park and rec board did not make a decision to go to Iraq. That was best left to the president.
And speaking about Iraq, sure it was a mess. But imagine what would have happened if only the states who supported the war had committed troops?
Since this is all stuff you learned in elementary school, I'm going to assume that I was misunderstood.
A company is a great example of a ruling system. If you've ever seen an employee try to do his own thing without manager approval, you see why governing and consensus is important. The same if you've ever operated without a line manager, or without a clear design document, or dealt with scope creep on a major project.
Things work better when everyone works towards a common goal. Management that makes a decision and sticks to it until the project is complete, or the situation changes generally works better than a management that can't make up it's mind. (This is not a dig on Karry BTW.)
It's fair to note that ID is primarily championed by the proponents of creationism, not of science or philosophy.
To be honest, when I was younger I thought that all modern Christians believed what's come to be known as ID. I was surprised to learn that a notable number still believe the earth is 6000 years old.
Just because the current government is doing poorly doesn't mean that any alternative is going to perform better. In fact, given our amazing success as a country, I suspect that great improvements are about a major tuneup of what we're already doing, rather than replacing it with an untested system.
Remember, we were victories in World War 2, and recovered with one of the strongest economies of the 20th century.
We've been progressively moving away from those policies since.
Agreed, but no matter how livable the wage, no teacher is capable of teaching 40 students alone. Smaller class sizes are *critical*, especially in sub-standard schools.
I would not be surprised to find that the teacher to student ratio tends to directly correlate to the performance of students.
It is not the government's job to plan things for us. It is hilariously bad at it, anyway. It is the government's job to protect our liberties so we can do things ourselves.
We are perfectly capable of organizing our own local educational systems. Some of them won't be as good as others, but they can learn from the ones that are successful.
Having the government plan it, and run it, will just guarantee that the quality continues to degrade universally.
Its not your CEOs job to plan the direction of your company, it's the job of the individual employees. The Janitors are perfectly capable of organizing the engineering group. Some teams won't be as good as others, but they can learn from the ones that are successful.
But seriously, things tend to work out much better with one common ideal or goal (even if it's marginal,) than with a lot of individual ideas working in isolation with varying degrees of potential.
The government shouldn't micromanage every detail, but it should be involved in the scope, passing down responsibility to smaller governing bodies where possible.
Intelligent design is not an alternative to Evolution. It's an alternative to creationism.
Evolution is a scientific theory that has so far stood up to the tests of peer review.
Intelligent design is not a scientific theory, and has abysmally failed the the tests of peer review. If you want to teach intelligent design in class as an alternative theory, you might as well teach FSMism...
Teach Intelligent design in Theology class, because it has no basis in science.
Slashdot Mirror
This technology works by increasing the resolution of the bits coded onto the CD, so that the zeros are rounder, and the ones have the little tip at the top, and a flat line along the bottom.
But seriously... How about we improve CDs by setting a standard that eliminates harsh audio compression, and sets limits on the audio leveling..?
...and carries the same level of security as speaking your password every time you type it.
Seriously, biometrics are a bad idea, unless also combined with other methods of authentication.
Very true. Sometimes I wonder if Hitler wasn't ultimately in our favor... Perhaps if he hadn't risen to power, someone more competent would have come along.
I've found that abstract names work well in small companies, where servers tend to handle a lot of different roles and are often moved or re-purposed.
For larger companies where most machines are single tasked and configuration management is in place, it makes more sense to name based on the machine's role. For example: sf-corp-web-01 will be kickstarted and given a new name before it becomes a corporate quake... Uh... I mean mail, server.
Beyond that, they are basing their figure on the number of papers withdrawn due to an error . That would imply that the errors were noticed by other scientists and corrected. Given the amount of interest the LHC project is generating, I think it's safe to assume that the risk analysis has survived the test of massive peer review.
So the real question is: how many papers have been massively peer reviewed without anyone noticing major errors? I suspect that figure doesn't exist, and yet I'm sure it's much lower than the numbers quoted here.
Okay seriously?
The probability that Jimbo is wrong is unrelated to the probability of your tire failing. If jimbo says that you have a 1% chance of your tire failing, but there's a 50% chance that jimbo is wrong we can reach the following conclusion: There is a 50% chance that your tire has a 1% chance of failing. There is a 50% chance that your tire has some other probability of failing. Some other probability of failing includes values such as 0%, .5%, and 2%. It also includes a 100% probability of your tire failing.
However, we have to assume that Jim isn't pulling the 1% figure out of his ass. If your tire was 100% likely to fail, we can still assume that Jim based his statement on a reasonable analysis. Perhaps Jim didn't notice a nail in your tire, but without knowing the quality of Jim's inspection of your tire, or without having access information Jim doesn't have, it's hard to say that he has a 50% chance of being wrong.
Finally, in some cases a professional will include a certain amount of leeway in his figure. Chances are, Jim fully inspected the tire and doesn't see any reason why it would fail prematurely. Chances are, that 1% is left as wiggle room in case of invisible manufacturing defect or a mistake in his evaluation. In this case, Jim has already factored into his evaluation the chances that he's incorrect.
There's a huge difference between criticism and ridicule. To be frank, most of us went through that kind of stuff growing up. Very few of us turned out anti-social.
In my experience, the difficulty of older games wasn't purely about difficulty, it was about making a small amount of content entertaining for a long time.
I'm a fan of older Super NES games. Going back with a modern emulator, such as SNES9x is a very interesting experience. The emulator not only allows you to save state, but also to fast-forward through boring parts, or rewind slightly, to just before a fatal mistake.
In my experience, when dieing and grinding are eliminated, most older games are surprisingly short. Many old shooters can be completed in the course of an hour or so. RPGs may take longer, but not nearly the 80 hours they used to consume back in the day.
Modern games can eliminate the grind thanks to the vast amounts of content. Completing half-life 2 takes nearly 4 hours when played straight through, with minimal deaths or saving and loading. The entertainment factor in modern games is about the environments, obstacles, and stories. It's about a good twitch, rather than the pleasure of overcoming an extreme challenge (Contra 1?)
But, if you ease environmental and employment regulations enough to compete like China, we'll end up being like China: massive pollution, unlivable wages, and the destruction of the American dream. Personally, I'd rather not see that happen.
America is a MAJOR consumer of Chinese products. Our leverage exists in the ability to set import restrictions designed to give American industry the ability to compete domestically.
Hell, you don't even have to use a tariff. Simply set limits on the prices the Chinese are allowed to sell their products for.
"We aren't going to charge a tariff. You just have to charge the same price for your products as domestic producers. What you do with that money is up to you. We suggest you pay your workers."
I recently returned from a business trip in London. While I was there, I learned that the roads were narrow. In many cases, traffic was traveling both directions on a road no larger than a single lane. Drivers would quickly swerve out of the way for oncoming traffic. As someone who commutes on a motorcycle, sharing lanes at high speeds, and enjoys his time on a race track, I found the thought of driving in London very intimidating. And yet, the actual rate of accidents didn't seem to be much different than here in the US.
I've found that drivers all generally accept a certain amount of risk. For every increase in perceived safety, you see a corresponding increase in risk taking.
I drive a BMW motorcycle. Does that make me a porcupine?
How often do you edit a single byte without updating the rest of the block? How often do you write period? And, what difference does it make weather you burned out a single byte within a block, or the entire block?
Furthermore, wear leveling should keep this from burning out a specific block on the device: every time the block is re-written, it goes on a different part of the disk.
Who told you this?
Wear leveling is handled at the firmware level, and should be transparent to the application. There's no reason it should cause issues any more than RAID, error correction or sector re-mapping causes issues on current hard drives.
So, is a billion 10 to the 9th power (AKA a short billion, or modern billion?) or is it 10 to the 12th power (AKA: a million millions, long billion, or old English billion?)
A megabyte was defined as 2 to the 30th power because computer addresses are based on the number two. That's why addresses are typically written in hexadecimal, or octal. Measuring IT numbers this way is still extremely useful.
By attempting to re-define 'Megabyte' in a way that is more convenient to yourself, you only serve to confuse matters for everyone else. Yes, it sometimes takes a moment to explain the issue to the un-initiated, but they can typically get it. Re-defining the meaning confuses everyone unless everyone simultaneously agrees on the new meaning.
It's worth noteing, that computational sizes are very clearly separated from SI units. If you say Kilobyte, it's very clear that you're not speaking about the same unit of measurement as a Kilogram, or any other SI unit.
You know... I can fight with my hands and feet. I can fight with a knife, or a sword, or a stick, or a staff, or a bow, or a gun. Yet, I haven't been in a fight since I was 14.
You make it sound like the only options are either aggression, or appeasement. There's a lot of grey area.
Setting the value of preventative maintenance is easy. Take the amount of downtime you would expect without your services. Subtract the amount of downtime you typically experience. Now, take the average salary for every person employed at your company that relies on your IT infrastructure. Multiply that by the number of people who rely on your infrastructure. Repeat the same project by how much your work improves employee efficiency. If your optimizations improve productivity for each employee by 5%, you've just paid your salary in any company with 20 or more people. That's how much your worth.
For example. An unmaintained network might experience two days downtime in the course of a quarter. Add to that the cost of bringing in a consultant (say, $150-$300 an hour for 10 hours) to fix it. If you have 20 people relying on your network, and the average salary is $30 an hour, you're saving $6300 a quarter on top of the efficiency improvements.
Maybe you help the CEO with his printer. If you save him an hour of time, how much are you saving the company?
The key to evaluating your worth to the organization is to keep in mind what other people's time is worth. It's easy to justify yourself in that way.
I think you mean OS/2 based. ;)
Every time I hear people throw out the 'S' word, I cry a little inside. The democrats are NOT liberal. They are at best moderate. Opposing one of the most conservative parties in the country would only make them liberal in a monochrome world.
Democrats and Obama are the party of the center.
Go to England, France, or pretty much any other socially progressive country for a comparison. Ask where they place him in the scheme of things, and you're likely to hear "he's a moderate." Then compare that country to a socialist nation, such as it existed in communist Russia, (where government service socializes YOU.)
Seriously.
I have been in London on business over the past two weeks. As a man with a very California look, and a very American accent, I clearly stand out. For the most part, everyone I've talked to has been very comfortable, and very friendly with me.
I did though, have a chance to speak to an English customs officer as I attempted to re-enter the country aboard the Eurostar. After requesting that I filled out another of the European visitors, I had a chance to ask her what she thought of Americans. I said that I heard we had a bad reputation, but that I was trying to do my part to improve it.
Her response was: "Well, the reputation is well earned." She smiled. "And you are doing your part. You seem really nice."
You're talking about a lady who sees Americans coming back and forth every day across the boarder.
Fact is, it's easy to write off other people's attitudes towards yourself. But usually, if you have a bad reputation, you've done something to earn it. And ultimately, it's well and good to believe we're the strongest nation on earth, but we aren't. And right now, our position in the world is rapidly declining. When you need the help of friends, it's good to have them.
I think our electoral system disagrees with you. There is never a consensus, but there is always a decision. Once a decision is made, it's made and everyone is expected up to abide by it. We ended up with bush, even though he only had a slim majority of the vote. That system tends to work better than the one we tried in 1861.
The federal government makes decisions for the entire united states, but it leaves more focused policy up to increasingly small geographic ruling bodies. The state makes state policy, the county makes county policy, the town makes town policy, and individual boards within the towns make even more specialized local policy. For example: the President of the united states of America DID NOT decision as to weather or not to hire a new gardener for our local park and recreation district. That was left to the local park and rec board. The park and rec board did not make a decision to go to Iraq. That was best left to the president.
And speaking about Iraq, sure it was a mess. But imagine what would have happened if only the states who supported the war had committed troops?
Since this is all stuff you learned in elementary school, I'm going to assume that I was misunderstood.
A company is a great example of a ruling system. If you've ever seen an employee try to do his own thing without manager approval, you see why governing and consensus is important. The same if you've ever operated without a line manager, or without a clear design document, or dealt with scope creep on a major project.
Things work better when everyone works towards a common goal. Management that makes a decision and sticks to it until the project is complete, or the situation changes generally works better than a management that can't make up it's mind. (This is not a dig on Karry BTW.)
Thanks for adding your comments!
It's fair to note that ID is primarily championed by the proponents of creationism, not of science or philosophy.
To be honest, when I was younger I thought that all modern Christians believed what's come to be known as ID. I was surprised to learn that a notable number still believe the earth is 6000 years old.
Just because the current government is doing poorly doesn't mean that any alternative is going to perform better. In fact, given our amazing success as a country, I suspect that great improvements are about a major tuneup of what we're already doing, rather than replacing it with an untested system.
Remember, we were victories in World War 2, and recovered with one of the strongest economies of the 20th century.
We've been progressively moving away from those policies since.
Agreed, but no matter how livable the wage, no teacher is capable of teaching 40 students alone. Smaller class sizes are *critical*, especially in sub-standard schools.
I would not be surprised to find that the teacher to student ratio tends to directly correlate to the performance of students.
It is not the government's job to plan things for us. It is hilariously bad at it, anyway. It is the government's job to protect our liberties so we can do things ourselves.
We are perfectly capable of organizing our own local educational systems. Some of them won't be as good as others, but they can learn from the ones that are successful.
Having the government plan it, and run it, will just guarantee that the quality continues to degrade universally.
Its not your CEOs job to plan the direction of your company, it's the job of the individual employees. The Janitors are perfectly capable of organizing the engineering group. Some teams won't be as good as others, but they can learn from the ones that are successful.
But seriously, things tend to work out much better with one common ideal or goal (even if it's marginal,) than with a lot of individual ideas working in isolation with varying degrees of potential.
The government shouldn't micromanage every detail, but it should be involved in the scope, passing down responsibility to smaller governing bodies where possible.
Intelligent design is not an alternative to Evolution. It's an alternative to creationism.
Evolution is a scientific theory that has so far stood up to the tests of peer review.
Intelligent design is not a scientific theory, and has abysmally failed the the tests of peer review. If you want to teach intelligent design in class as an alternative theory, you might as well teach FSMism...
Teach Intelligent design in Theology class, because it has no basis in science.