This conclusion is even more baffling in light of Colleen Rowler's memo and the now infamous "Pheonix" memo. It seems to me that the information gathering was rather effective, just poorly coordinated. The connections leading to 9/11 could have been made if the FBI had merely Googled their own information!
The Lexx finale rocked. I was irritated that they spent all of the last season on Earth, but watching the Lexx dice and slice the blue planet more than made up for it. Hehee. What a great show.
That's the punchline?? The aliens are coming? Well thanks for the clue Paul Revere, no one saw that coming. Oh but wait, their arrival coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar. Ooooo! That's creeeeeepy! Hit the creeeeeeepy music Mark Snow, gotta get the folks at home in a twist so they'll come see the movie and PAY us for giving them blueballs! Genius!
If there's a power failure or Windows 98 freezes up, how much have we lost?
We will, of course, ensure the model state is saved to disk at least once per day (real time) so as little information as possible is lost in the event of an interruption -- if all goes to plan, you should be able to copy the re-start file over to a new PC if you decide to upgrade while running the experiment. More frequent dumps would simply slow the integration down and eventually wear out your hard disk.
I seriously doubt that more frequent backups would wear out the hard disk, but at least there's a way for users to protect the work done on their machine.
Won't all these computers being left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the Climate System?
Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the Casino-21 project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of energy.
That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the Casino-21 project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea.
Is 5,400,000 cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council, some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!
Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the Casino-21 project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.
If this thing takes eight months to complete, I sure hope they plan on storing periodic checkpoints of progress for each test in a central location. What happens if my machine gets hosed at four months? Is all that data lost?
Kind of a shame they didn't see fit to work that into the history of his character. In addition to ST being a landmark television show with respect to gender and race, they had the opportunity to deal with physical disabilities as well. Might have brought something more to the character as well, a freak engineering accident or something.
What's the aim of this book, really? Is it meant to give the layperson in either field a hobby in the other? Are you supposed to read this and then go get a job in bioinformatics? As a Perl programmer with an interest in Biology but no formal training in it, I can say with certainty that it's not the latter. To land a job in that field you basically must have a graduate degree one of the two fields, preferably with significant formal education in the other as well.
I might pick up this book because it sounds genuinely worthwhile, but I fully expect that at the end of it I'd feel more than anything that I needed to go back to school.
The relevant change was the shift from the CAP protocol to DMT. In most cases this means the difference between Cisco 675 and 678, although there are some 675s that support DMT. As I understand it, this is a hardware issue, and has nothing to do with CBOS (Cisco Broadband OS), so when Qwest customers either move their service or start new service, they are forced to upgrade to the 678.
I gave up on DSL after finding that I had to upgrade my router ($95) and pay an extra $70 startup fee for choosing an ISP other than Microsoft. This is why I chose to go with AT&T Broadband cable (which, sadly, is now in part owned by MS).
The partnership between MS and Qwest is a winning proposition for those companies for two reasons: First, the financial deterrent is high enough for the bulk of people -- for whom hatred of MS is not a lifestyle -- simply to go with the default offering. Second, I suspect that a great many people don't actually know the difference between the provider of the DSL line and the ISP, and so the question of which ISP to use is one likely considered with apprehension and frustration, leading people again simply to accept what Qwest suggests (MS).
Financially, it's not going to be possible to fight the MS/Qwest alliance for the reasons above, which makes the litigation here a last line of defense for competition in the broadband market. Unfortunately, if successful action is to be taken, it will be in the form of another lengthy anti-trust case -- a class action lawsuit on the part of slighted customers won't work, because while Qwest's choice of partners is offensive to some people, the bottom line is that Qwest is still providing the service that people are paying for, and in so doing they are fulfilling their legal obligation to the customer.
The real kicker here is that we know from recent experience how long it takes to establish corrective measures to control Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, and in the time it takes to do so dozens of small, homegrown ISPs will starve.
Given the current tendency among psychologists to reduce psychological matters to physical causes, I don't think this distinction is much of a counter argument.
Right clickable context menus are something that the average secretary or insurance broker or customer service rep has probably never heard of.
context menus are *the single most useful thing in GUIs*, yet most users don't know about them and avant-garde techies pleasure themselves to thoughts of the next great interface paradigm
.NET differs from Microsoft's previous efforts in building cross-language component architecture (COM/DCOM). While COM (like CORBA) allows you to invoke methods/functions from one language to another, the common runtime allows data-level interoperability. The difference is that with COM/CORBA you modify objects through their interfaces, so everything is done via function calls (possibly many of them). In contrast, to modify an object in the common runtime you can just change it directly, since each language uses the same data representation, same address space and same garbage collector (when performing remote function calls the situation becomes more similar to DCOM or CORBA).
Well that's funny. Last I heard, data encapsulation and the separation of interface from implementation were were things to strive for, not circumvent.
umm, I don't think that was Sainsbury's point. I went back to the original article to see if I had misinterpreted the quote. I hadn't. In fact, and this is pretty odd, the page was corrected sometime in the last two hours, replacing "astrology" with "astronomy".
Is causing websites to fix their material part of the Slashdot Effect?
Found a lovely quote on CNN from Britain's Science Minister Lord Sainsbury, the person responsible for forming the committee on near earth asteroids:
"We put a lot of money into astrology and I think it's sensible to put just a little bit in to making certain that we know if there is a danger of an object hitting our very fragile planet," Lord Sainsbury said.
Hmm, if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?
At this point in the series's run, the X-files has degenerated into such completely silly nonsense that it really doesn't matter who replaces Duchovny. The show peaked years ago and has been in a slow and sad decline for the past three seasons, and here's why:
(1) What made the show so good earlier in its life was that the tension between Mulder's and Scully's respective theories was very carefully cultivated and maintained, preserving the ambiguity about 'the truth' of what was going on. At the end of the better written episodes, one could often side with either, and not be obviously stupid. This was a good thing, because it implicitly raised questions about e.g., the proper measurement of scientific evidence, how to view 'recalcitrant' data, or data incompatible with an otherwise succussful and coherent body of scientific knowledge, and so forth.
These days however, we know to expect that Mulder's explanations will be correct, and so even Scully now parodies herself. This is not very interesting.
(2) Unfortunately, while we're still in the dark about the true machinations of the grand conspiracy, we do know the following for certain: *Anything and everything that violates the understanding of nature that science provides us with must be true*
So, whereas Mulder and Scully used to find evidence of things that at least could eventually be explained through a consistent expansion of existing scientific theories, e.g., aliens and genetic freaks, now absolutely every idiotic belief that you might encounter is validated: ghosts, psychic powers, the Bermuda Triangle, Satan, witchcraft, voodoo dolls, fucking everything is true.
And the solution is...
duh! get that talking dinosaur in there, let Scully hold a seance to find out what's really going on, lure the baddies to the Bermuda Triangle and sacrifice them to the devil! We'll have a nice tidy ending and be done with the affair. Oscars to me please...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm holding out for Titanic Linux.
This conclusion is even more baffling in light of Colleen Rowler's memo and the now infamous "Pheonix" memo. It seems to me that the information gathering was rather effective, just poorly coordinated. The connections leading to 9/11 could have been made if the FBI had merely Googled their own information!
The Lexx finale rocked. I was irritated that they spent all of the last season on Earth, but watching the Lexx dice and slice the blue planet more than made up for it. Hehee. What a great show.
That's the punchline?? The aliens are coming? Well thanks for the clue Paul Revere, no one saw that coming. Oh but wait, their arrival coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar. Ooooo! That's creeeeeepy! Hit the creeeeeeepy music Mark Snow, gotta get the folks at home in a twist so they'll come see the movie and PAY us for giving them blueballs! Genius!
Aha, I found the answer in the FAQ:
If there's a power failure or Windows 98 freezes up, how much have we lost?
We will, of course, ensure the model state is saved to disk at least once per day (real time) so as little information as possible is lost in the event of an interruption -- if all goes to plan, you should be able to copy the re-start file over to a new PC if you decide to upgrade while running the experiment. More frequent dumps would simply slow the integration down and eventually wear out your hard disk.
I seriously doubt that more frequent backups would wear out the hard disk, but at least there's a way for users to protect the work done on their machine.
From the FAQ:
Won't all these computers being left on for 24 hours a day have a detrimental impact on the Climate System?
Assume a computer running 24hrs/day requires, on average, 50W of power. If 100,000 computers join the Casino-21 project, the project will require 5,000kW of power. There are 24 hours in a day, so each day the project will consume 120,000kW-hrs, or 432,000,000kJ of energy.
That's a big number, so let's try and put it in perspective by calculating how much energy is necessary to boil water for a cup of tea. Assuming a specific heat of water of 4.19 kJ/(kg-K), 0.237kg/cup of water, a necessary temperature rise from 20 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius, and that only one cup of water is boiled for each cup of tea, then about 80kJ/cup of energy are necessary (assuming our kettle is 100% efficient). This means that running the Casino-21 project for one day is equivalent to boiling water for 5,400,000 cups of tea.
Is 5,400,000 cups of tea a lot? According to the Tea Council, some 37 million people in the United Kingdom drink, on average, 3.4 cups of tea per day. That's nearly 126 million cups of tea per day in the UK alone!
Each day, about 23 times more energy will be spent boiling water for tea in the United Kingdom than would be used by the computers involved in the Casino-21 project. More seriously, a rough calculation suggests that 100,000 computers running 24hrs/day for one year at a power consumption of 50W will contribute approximately 0.0001% of the total amount of CO2 generated in one year. This is not an insignificant amount, but seems (to us) a worthwhile investment to better understand the climate system.
If this thing takes eight months to complete, I sure hope they plan on storing periodic checkpoints of progress for each test in a central location. What happens if my machine gets hosed at four months? Is all that data lost?
Kind of a shame they didn't see fit to work that into the history of his character. In addition to ST being a landmark television show with respect to gender and race, they had the opportunity to deal with physical disabilities as well. Might have brought something more to the character as well, a freak engineering accident or something.
What's the aim of this book, really? Is it meant to give the layperson in either field a hobby in the other? Are you supposed to read this and then go get a job in bioinformatics? As a Perl programmer with an interest in Biology but no formal training in it, I can say with certainty that it's not the latter. To land a job in that field you basically must have a graduate degree one of the two fields, preferably with significant formal education in the other as well.
I might pick up this book because it sounds genuinely worthwhile, but I fully expect that at the end of it I'd feel more than anything that I needed to go back to school.
The relevant change was the shift from the CAP protocol to DMT. In most cases this means the difference between Cisco 675 and 678, although there are some 675s that support DMT. As I understand it, this is a hardware issue, and has nothing to do with CBOS (Cisco Broadband OS), so when Qwest customers either move their service or start new service, they are forced to upgrade to the 678.
I gave up on DSL after finding that I had to upgrade my router ($95) and pay an extra $70 startup fee for choosing an ISP other than Microsoft. This is why I chose to go with AT&T Broadband cable (which, sadly, is now in part owned by MS).
The partnership between MS and Qwest is a winning proposition for those companies for two reasons: First, the financial deterrent is high enough for the bulk of people -- for whom hatred of MS is not a lifestyle -- simply to go with the default offering. Second, I suspect that a great many people don't actually know the difference between the provider of the DSL line and the ISP, and so the question of which ISP to use is one likely considered with apprehension and frustration, leading people again simply to accept what Qwest suggests (MS).
Financially, it's not going to be possible to fight the MS/Qwest alliance for the reasons above, which makes the litigation here a last line of defense for competition in the broadband market. Unfortunately, if successful action is to be taken, it will be in the form of another lengthy anti-trust case -- a class action lawsuit on the part of slighted customers won't work, because while Qwest's choice of partners is offensive to some people, the bottom line is that Qwest is still providing the service that people are paying for, and in so doing they are fulfilling their legal obligation to the customer.
The real kicker here is that we know from recent experience how long it takes to establish corrective measures to control Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, and in the time it takes to do so dozens of small, homegrown ISPs will starve.
Current projects:
Good God, vi?!
Given the current tendency among psychologists to reduce psychological matters to physical causes, I don't think this distinction is much of a counter argument.
Right clickable context menus are something that the average secretary or insurance broker or customer service rep has probably never heard of.
context menus are *the single most useful thing in GUIs*, yet most users don't know about them and avant-garde techies pleasure themselves to thoughts of the next great interface paradigm
Well that's funny. Last I heard, data encapsulation and the separation of interface from implementation were were things to strive for, not circumvent.
How does the IU Knowledge Base work?
umm, I don't think that was Sainsbury's point. I went back to the original article to see if I had misinterpreted the quote. I hadn't. In fact, and this is pretty odd, the page was corrected sometime in the last two hours, replacing "astrology" with "astronomy".
Is causing websites to fix their material part of the Slashdot Effect?
Found a lovely quote on CNN from Britain's Science Minister Lord Sainsbury, the person responsible for forming the committee on near earth asteroids:
"We put a lot of money into astrology and I think it's sensible to put just a little bit in to making certain that we know if there is a danger of an object hitting our very fragile planet," Lord Sainsbury said.
Hmm, if I was born a Cancer when the moon and Saturn were aligned in metaconjunction (or whatever), will I get hit by an asteroid?
At this point in the series's run, the X-files has degenerated into such completely silly nonsense that it really doesn't matter who replaces Duchovny. The show peaked years ago and has been in a slow and sad decline for the past three seasons, and here's why:
(1) What made the show so good earlier in its life was that the tension between Mulder's and Scully's respective theories was very carefully cultivated and maintained, preserving the ambiguity about 'the truth' of what was going on. At the end of the better written episodes, one could often side with either, and not be obviously stupid. This was a good thing, because it implicitly raised questions about e.g., the proper measurement of scientific evidence, how to view 'recalcitrant' data, or data incompatible with an otherwise succussful and coherent body of scientific knowledge, and so forth.
These days however, we know to expect that Mulder's explanations will be correct, and so even Scully now parodies herself. This is not very interesting.
(2) Unfortunately, while we're still in the dark about the true machinations of the grand conspiracy, we do know the following for certain: *Anything and everything that violates the understanding of nature that science provides us with must be true*
So, whereas Mulder and Scully used to find evidence of things that at least could eventually be explained through a consistent expansion of existing scientific theories, e.g., aliens and genetic freaks, now absolutely every idiotic belief that you might encounter is validated: ghosts, psychic powers, the Bermuda Triangle, Satan, witchcraft, voodoo dolls, fucking everything is true.
And the solution is ...
duh! get that talking dinosaur in there, let Scully hold a seance to find out what's really going on, lure the baddies to the Bermuda Triangle and sacrifice them to the devil! We'll have a nice tidy ending and be done with the affair. Oscars to me please...