A moment's reflection makes it clear the $30-40K estimate is way too low:
Since this is reported on an Australian Web site, I'm assuming that the prices quoted are Australian dollars. That's about US$20-25K, I think.
I'd be extremely surprised if IBM is billing its people's time out at less than about US$200 an hour. That gives them maybe 100 person-hours to fix this problem.
This is a big site that's clearly database-driven and will be filled (we all hope) with highly time-sensitive dynamic content. So fixing this problem is not a matter of having a bunch of cheap labor go in and hand-code some ALT tags. It probably means a significant change to the database schema and the page-building code. Then testing it. All of the input and editing tools or scripts that producers use to publish content probably have to be modified. Documentation needs to be altered, training might be required. This is undoubtedly a non-trivial change. And I'm sure IBM has a very rigorous (read: lots of overhead) change-management process to prevent feature creep during the project.
Now, I'll admit that $2 million and a year does seem absurd. And somebody should be blamed for overlooking something so obvious during the specification stage, though it's not clear to me it should necessarily be IBM. But don't assume "Oh, this is an easy thing to fix" if you've never had to manage a site of this size and complexity.
I'm also fond of hydro, which was after all the most cost-effective source of power in SimCity , but many people are concerned about the impacts that hydro projects have.
The reservoirs created by large dams can require massive relocations of existing settlers. An estimated 1.3 million people, for example, will be moved in order to accommodate the notorious Three Gorges dam project in China. Additionally, the reservoirs can obliterate archaeological sites.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, a major concern about dams is how they affect salmon populations, as described here: "The dams impede juvenile and adult migrations to and from the ocean by their physical presence and by creating reservoirs. The reservoirs behind the dams slow water velocities, alter river temperatures, and increase predation potential. Reduced water velocity increases the time it takes juveniles to migrate downstream, higher water temperatures may have adverse effects on juvenile and adult behavior, and predators find prey more easily in slower-moving water."
Some folks also claim that the reservoirs of large dams actually contribute more to greenhouse-gas emissions (if these are really anything to be concerned about) than coal plants due to the increased amount of decaying biomass.
Personally I'm hoping two developments will help solve the energy-generation question: (1) microgeneration with small gas turbines and (2) instantaneous market-driven pricing and smart controllers that will cut aggregate power consumption.
Using this as a "sound cannon" or to pipe "the voice from above" into someone's head (anybody remember Real Genius?) is amusing, but as I see it the killer app is building this into cell phones so that when one rings at a meeting you don't get 10 people simultaneously clutching at their pockets, backpacks, etc.
right, an environmental engineer of mine pointed out to me that cow farts and rice paddies are huge sources of methane, which is indeed a greenhouse gas. Of course, both are largely by-products of humanity: There wouldn't be nearly so many farting cows if McDonalds hadn't served 100 bazillion burgers.
The first two sentences seem to imply that, geographically speaking, these seemingly alarming events are not necessarily unusual:
We think of ice caps on our planet as "normal," because in the recent past there has always been polar ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. However, if we look at all of Earth history we find that there are also extended periods in which there were no polar ice caps.
It's clear that the Earth's climate is currently going through a warming period. It has been since the last ice age, ca. 18,000 years ago I think. I've visited glaciers in both Canada and New Zealand that make this point dramatically with markers that show where the foot of the glacier was located in a particular year. The Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, for example, has retreated something like 1.5 miles in the past 100 years. (That's from memory, and I could easily be off by a factor of 2 either way on either of those numbers). Or just consider that Yosemite Valley in California was carved by glaciers. Obviously the climate has changed just a bit since *that* happened.
But what this really comes down to is two things. First, what is humanity's contribution to global warming? Others on this thread have pointed out a number of possible alternate possible sources of change such as solar activity or changes in the Earth's orbit or tilt. Second, is global warming necessarily a bad thing? There are a number of reasons to believe it might be: more intense drought-flood cycles, rising sea levels, increased range of traditionally tropical diseases a la West Nile virus in New York City. Then again, global warming might have some benefits too. The obvious one is making land arable at more arctic latitudes (a reply of the Vikings-in-Greenland scenario). Less obvious but even more importantly, it might make it easier for me to get a tan here in Seattle <g>.
Seriously, we have virtually no clue what the truly long-term cyclical implications of climate change are; the warming part of a global warming-cooling cycle may be important to, say, the development of certain ocean currents that support various aquatic ecosystems. But who really knows?
I'm reminded of the fact that, for decades, U.S. Forest Service policy was to quash wildfires as soon as they occurred, because letting forests burn is obviously a bad thing, right? Except it turned out that the forests need fire in order to remain healthy. The result of decades of fire suppression has been the buildup of unnatural amounts of fuel, which has contributed to the disastrous fire situation that the U.S. has encountered this summer. Or to use a Lorentz butterfly-wing-flapping chaos analogy: If I sneeze right now, I might start eddies that end up developing into a hurricane that destroys Haiti. Then again, if I don't sneeze right now, I might not disrupt the airflow that is going to end up developing into the hurricane that destroys Haiti.
When it comes to long-term climactic changes, we (including me!) are all sitting here pontificating about how we should behave to optimize a tremendously complex, probably chaotic, system whose inputs, outputs, and function we really don't understand. Given our incredible lack of knowledge, I'm inclined not to thrash and scream about humanity's influence at this point. Yes, we should watch and study, and we should enhance and tune our models, and we should take sensible steps to minimize obvious human impact on the environment. But let's not try to undo the Industrial Revolution just yet.
I'm led to understand that Japanese, like Chinese and Korean, is an ideogrammatic language that uses a large number characters to represent entire words/concepts rather than a small set of individual characters (letters) that are combined into words, as does English. Presumably this means that a Japanese-based programming language wouldn't be practical in ASCII alone; it would require a more sophisticated character set like Unicode, which uses two bytes to store each character. In the long run I think that's probably a good thing, since the Internet and computers are international and ASCII is a big impediment to supporting non-English languages. (Of course, the fact that ASCII has been the dominant standard probably puts a pretty big hurdle in the way of gaining widespread adoption for a completely different approach.) I know there is a phonetic version of Japanese that is sometimes used for foreign and technical words; I'd be curious to know from any Japanese speakers here whether a Japanese programming language would've used that notation (which might let it work in ASCII) or the ideogrammatic one.
But aside from the character-set issue, I bet if Perl were in Japanese, it wouldn't seem that fundamentally different. The logic and constructs would presumably be the same (pretty much every language has if-then-else, while, etc.). You'd need to learn a new set of keywords, of course. And maybe some of the symbols that the language depends on wouldn't be on your keyboard (ouch!).
I'd think the hardest part would be using third-party modules whose names you didn't understand. Imagine going to CPAN if all those module names were in Japanese (or any other language you didn't know). And all the documentation, too!
Slightly off-topic question here: Someone once told me that the source code for SAP is "written in" German -- i.e., even though the language itself is C or something English-derived, variable names, comments, and so on are all in German. Anyone know if this is true? Anyone (either German-speaking or not) worked with that source enough to be able to comment on the implications? I'm curious...
isn't it English-speaking management consultants that, in the face of Japan's apparent manufacturing domination in the Eighties, started picking up all those cool Japanese terms like kaizen and keiretsu?
Seriously, though, vlax is right: languages do not somehow limit people's ability to form thoughts. The logical and empirical arguments supporting this view are extensive, unlike those supporting the thoroughly discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Of course, it is quite imaginable that cultural, organizational, or other factors along those lines could underlie the difference that Churchill perceived in Japanese tactical behavior. For example, British and American military doctrine could well leave more autonomy to lower-level commanders, allowing them to "wing it" if they encountered information that required modification of their plan in order to achieve the desired end. But IANAmilitary(strategist|historian).
IANAL and all that, but based on the excellent document at the U.S. Copyright Office Web site, http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/ci rc1.html, I believe some clarification is in order. (Obviously this only applies to the U.S.; your mileage/kilometerage may vary in other jurisdictions. Also note that the laws have changed in the past couple of decades, so I suppose if you wrote your thesis 30 years ago different circumstances may have applied.)
Key excerpts:
The way in which copyright protection is secured is frequently misunderstood. No publication or registration or other action in the Copyright Office is required to secure copyright....Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created [and fixed in "tangible form"]
The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U. S. law, although it is often beneficial.
[Key to this particular topic:] In the case of works made for hire, the employer and not the employee is considered to be the author.
There is no such thing as an "international copyright" that will automatically protect an author's writings throughout the entire world....However, most countries do offer protection to foreign works under certain conditions
Copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection
Let's see, my TiVo is already connected to my stereo and my 35-inch TV, and it's got a nice big hard disk inside. Seems like it would make a pretty decent home MP3 server, with a cool on-screen interface too. Oh, and it's connected to the phone line, so somebody could presumably create Napster-like functionality that would let it trade music as well.
The TiVo unit makes recommendations and automatically records stuff based on your viewing preferences (it has little thumbs up/down buttons you can press for shows you like/dislike), so it could presumably be programmed do the same for music. And this could be made legal, too: It would be pretty easy to make dedicated hardware like a TiVo unit track what somebody actually listens to and then implement some kind of pricing scheme against it.
So what I am suggesting as a sort of TiVo 2.0 Home Media Server is this: an Ethernet connection (since cable/DSL would be vastly better than a modem connection), MP3 rip/playback support, software that would automatically download/record your favorite musical selections, and an agreement with record labels that would let me do this with their blessing. Of course the thing could have a slick, WinAmp-like UI that could run on my TV.
Technically this seems entirely feasible to me. And personally I'd be happy to support a legal MP3-swapping scheme where artists were compensated for their efforts. Of course you can imagine all kinds of bells and whistles that could get added, too (on-screen ordering of physical CDs, concert tix, etc.).
It is, of course, possible to represent any rational (note: not real) number exactly. No, the IEEE standard that's implemented in hardware in most CPUs doesn't do it, but you can easily create a compound data type of the form "int numerator, denominator" and write corresponding arithmetic routines manipulate things in their fractional representation without any loss of precision. If you need to store 17.15 exactly, you convert it on entry to 343/20. (Or, if you know you're dealing with something like dollars and cents and know for certain you only have to work with two decimal points, you just use integers with implied fixed decimal points.)
Now, irrational numbers are another ball of wax... how many digits of pi do you feel like computing/storing?:-)
I think it's fair to describe HAL as all-knowing and all-powerful. He certainly seemed as intelligent and conversational as many humans I know:-)
Interesting factoid: When 2001 originally came out, IBM paid for every employee to go see it, to get a vision of the great future of computing that their company (and others, of course) were working toward.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I'll admit that $2 million and a year does seem absurd. And somebody should be blamed for overlooking something so obvious during the specification stage, though it's not clear to me it should necessarily be IBM. But don't assume "Oh, this is an easy thing to fix" if you've never had to manage a site of this size and complexity.
The reservoirs created by large dams can require massive relocations of existing settlers. An estimated 1.3 million people, for example, will be moved in order to accommodate the notorious Three Gorges dam project in China. Additionally, the reservoirs can obliterate archaeological sites.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, a major concern about dams is how they affect salmon populations, as described here: "The dams impede juvenile and adult migrations to and from the ocean by their physical presence and by creating reservoirs. The reservoirs behind the dams slow water velocities, alter river temperatures, and increase predation potential. Reduced water velocity increases the time it takes juveniles to migrate downstream, higher water temperatures may have adverse effects on juvenile and adult behavior, and predators find prey more easily in slower-moving water."
Some folks also claim that the reservoirs of large dams actually contribute more to greenhouse-gas emissions (if these are really anything to be concerned about) than coal plants due to the increased amount of decaying biomass.
Personally I'm hoping two developments will help solve the energy-generation question: (1) microgeneration with small gas turbines and (2) instantaneous market-driven pricing and smart controllers that will cut aggregate power consumption.
Using this as a "sound cannon" or to pipe "the voice from above" into someone's head (anybody remember Real Genius?) is amusing, but as I see it the killer app is building this into cell phones so that when one rings at a meeting you don't get 10 people simultaneously clutching at their pockets, backpacks, etc.
right, an environmental engineer of mine pointed out to me that cow farts and rice paddies are huge sources of methane, which is indeed a greenhouse gas. Of course, both are largely by-products of humanity: There wouldn't be nearly so many farting cows if McDonalds hadn't served 100 bazillion burgers.
http://www.h artwick.edu/geology/work/VFT-so-far/glaciers/glac
The first two sentences seem to imply that, geographically speaking, these seemingly alarming events are not necessarily unusual:
We think of ice caps on our planet as "normal," because in the recent past there has always been polar ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions. However, if we look at all of Earth history we find that there are also extended periods in which there were no polar ice caps.
It's clear that the Earth's climate is currently going through a warming period. It has been since the last ice age, ca. 18,000 years ago I think. I've visited glaciers in both Canada and New Zealand that make this point dramatically with markers that show where the foot of the glacier was located in a particular year. The Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, for example, has retreated something like 1.5 miles in the past 100 years. (That's from memory, and I could easily be off by a factor of 2 either way on either of those numbers). Or just consider that Yosemite Valley in California was carved by glaciers. Obviously the climate has changed just a bit since *that* happened.
But what this really comes down to is two things. First, what is humanity's contribution to global warming? Others on this thread have pointed out a number of possible alternate possible sources of change such as solar activity or changes in the Earth's orbit or tilt. Second, is global warming necessarily a bad thing? There are a number of reasons to believe it might be: more intense drought-flood cycles, rising sea levels, increased range of traditionally tropical diseases a la West Nile virus in New York City. Then again, global warming might have some benefits too. The obvious one is making land arable at more arctic latitudes (a reply of the Vikings-in-Greenland scenario). Less obvious but even more importantly, it might make it easier for me to get a tan here in Seattle <g>.
Seriously, we have virtually no clue what the truly long-term cyclical implications of climate change are; the warming part of a global warming-cooling cycle may be important to, say, the development of certain ocean currents that support various aquatic ecosystems. But who really knows?
I'm reminded of the fact that, for decades, U.S. Forest Service policy was to quash wildfires as soon as they occurred, because letting forests burn is obviously a bad thing, right? Except it turned out that the forests need fire in order to remain healthy. The result of decades of fire suppression has been the buildup of unnatural amounts of fuel, which has contributed to the disastrous fire situation that the U.S. has encountered this summer. Or to use a Lorentz butterfly-wing-flapping chaos analogy: If I sneeze right now, I might start eddies that end up developing into a hurricane that destroys Haiti. Then again, if I don't sneeze right now, I might not disrupt the airflow that is going to end up developing into the hurricane that destroys Haiti.
When it comes to long-term climactic changes, we (including me!) are all sitting here pontificating about how we should behave to optimize a tremendously complex, probably chaotic, system whose inputs, outputs, and function we really don't understand. Given our incredible lack of knowledge, I'm inclined not to thrash and scream about humanity's influence at this point. Yes, we should watch and study, and we should enhance and tune our models, and we should take sensible steps to minimize obvious human impact on the environment. But let's not try to undo the Industrial Revolution just yet.
But aside from the character-set issue, I bet if Perl were in Japanese, it wouldn't seem that fundamentally different. The logic and constructs would presumably be the same (pretty much every language has if-then-else, while, etc.). You'd need to learn a new set of keywords, of course. And maybe some of the symbols that the language depends on wouldn't be on your keyboard (ouch!).
I'd think the hardest part would be using third-party modules whose names you didn't understand. Imagine going to CPAN if all those module names were in Japanese (or any other language you didn't know). And all the documentation, too!
Slightly off-topic question here: Someone once told me that the source code for SAP is "written in" German -- i.e., even though the language itself is C or something English-derived, variable names, comments, and so on are all in German. Anyone know if this is true? Anyone (either German-speaking or not) worked with that source enough to be able to comment on the implications? I'm curious...
Seriously, though, vlax is right: languages do not somehow limit people's ability to form thoughts. The logical and empirical arguments supporting this view are extensive, unlike those supporting the thoroughly discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Of course, it is quite imaginable that cultural, organizational, or other factors along those lines could underlie the difference that Churchill perceived in Japanese tactical behavior. For example, British and American military doctrine could well leave more autonomy to lower-level commanders, allowing them to "wing it" if they encountered information that required modification of their plan in order to achieve the desired end. But IANAmilitary(strategist|historian).
Key excerpts:
The way in which copyright protection is secured is frequently misunderstood. No publication or registration or other action in the Copyright Office is required to secure copyright....Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created [and fixed in "tangible form"]
The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U. S. law, although it is often beneficial.
[Key to this particular topic:] In the case of works made for hire, the employer and not the employee is considered to be the author.
There is no such thing as an "international copyright" that will automatically protect an author's writings throughout the entire world....However, most countries do offer protection to foreign works under certain conditions
Copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection
The TiVo unit makes recommendations and automatically records stuff based on your viewing preferences (it has little thumbs up/down buttons you can press for shows you like/dislike), so it could presumably be programmed do the same for music. And this could be made legal, too: It would be pretty easy to make dedicated hardware like a TiVo unit track what somebody actually listens to and then implement some kind of pricing scheme against it.
So what I am suggesting as a sort of TiVo 2.0 Home Media Server is this: an Ethernet connection (since cable/DSL would be vastly better than a modem connection), MP3 rip/playback support, software that would automatically download/record your favorite musical selections, and an agreement with record labels that would let me do this with their blessing. Of course the thing could have a slick, WinAmp-like UI that could run on my TV.
Technically this seems entirely feasible to me. And personally I'd be happy to support a legal MP3-swapping scheme where artists were compensated for their efforts. Of course you can imagine all kinds of bells and whistles that could get added, too (on-screen ordering of physical CDs, concert tix, etc.).
Now, irrational numbers are another ball of wax... how many digits of pi do you feel like computing/storing? :-)
Interesting factoid: When 2001 originally came out, IBM paid for every employee to go see it, to get a vision of the great future of computing that their company (and others, of course) were working toward.