Sure, a good story can overcome its cliches, but the fact that submitter apparently doesn't have the first clue about what to write about doesn't bode well for the "good story" part.
BMOC: Containment has almost nothing to do with cold shutdown.
According to TEPCO, it does:
TEPCO: Definition of "Cold Shutdown Condition":... Release of radioactive materials from PCV is under control and public radiation exposure by additional release is being significantly held down.
TEPCO *is* changing the standard definition of "cold shutdown" somewhat. Now, they have *added* a containment requirement, so they're not really loosening any standards. Of course, normally "cold shutdown" doesn't include a containment requirement because normally the reactor vessel isn't breached.
zeigerpuppy has a point in that "cold shutdown" normally implies a state of normal control. Cold shutdown typically means the reactor is stopped, doesn't need active cooling, and can be safely opened for maintenance. Fuku is still an active disaster site.
I'm not advocating panic (what's the sense in that?), but fair criticism of TEPCO is, I think, well-deserved.
Skeptics worry that the readings would be inaccurate if the melted fuel rods punctured their containment vessels and fell to the bottoms of the outer containment tanks. TEPCO has not been able to take direct measurements of the temperatures at the bottoms of the containment vessels, and the site is still too radioactive for the fuel rods' status to be visually confirmed.
The biggest problem with Net Neutrality is that it isn't consistently defined. It means different things to different people. Indeed, in my experience, most of the people clamoring for Net Neutrality are very big about shouting "FREEDOM!!!!" like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. They love to complain that the big ISPs suck. But they're generally pretty short on specific ideas or completely-thought-through reasoning. This does not help.
Them: "Comcast sucks!" Me: "Yes, they do. So what do you propose to do about it?" Them: "Make them not suck!" Me: "Okay, but how?" Them: "Pass a law against them sucking." Me: "Could you explain specifically what it is you want to prohibit?" Them: "Everyone knows Comcast sucks!" Me: *sigh*
While there are some people who can hold an intelligent conversation about this, they seem to be few and far between.
Uh, unless something's changed, Verizon never had CarrierIQ to begin with.
Unless something's changed, VZW has denied using CarrierIQ, but has refused to explain why CarrierIQ was found to be connecting to servers with "vzw" in their names.
As a VZW customer, I'd be shocked if VZW wasn't doing something nefarious when it comes to customer monitoring. I'd also fully expect them to then lie about it.
Note well: This doesn't mean I'd trust Sprint (or AT&T or T-Mobile or whoever) over VZW. I wouldn't trust any of them.
Can anyone recommend any bank alternatives that are just handing out big bags of money to anyone who asks?
(Hint: Huge server farms and massive network connectivity have significant costs. (Misleading "YouTube's bandwidth bill is zero" headlines not withstanding.))
You're somewhat out of touch with reality. Half the world's population lives in rural areas[1]. Moving 3.5 trillion people to cities is not a realistic solution.
Cites also have the problem that, if infrastructure fails, everybody dies. They're not "survivable", in military terms.
Anyone running anything older than XP-SP2 is either a dedicated hobbyist or a criminally negligent system administrator
At $WORK, we've got a CNC machine that runs Win 2000. Only. Moving to a newer Windows release requires replacing the entire control, to the tune of $20K. Guess what we're still running!
(One could argue that means it's a crappy product. Well, I'd agree. But in my experience, most computer products are crappy. Which leaves those of us wanting to get actual work done stuck holding the bag.)
That particular computer doesn't need a web browser, so no loss, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario where one would want HTML rendering, maybe even an interface to some web-based business automation system.
I can say from experience that it's often cheaper, from a liability and general management stand-point, to simply destroy something that it is to facilitate giving it away. I guess you'd be surprised how much of a clusterfsck giving something away can be. You have to deal with tons of requests, people complaining they didn't get what they want or should be first. If it's a physical give-away you need to handle physical security, crowd control, inventory, liability insurance. It's cheaper to just chuck it in a dumpster (or skip, rather since it's the BBC). Liability doesn't go away just because you say it's someone else's problem now.
An auction, well, that can recoup it's own operating costs, so that's a better idea -- but only if the stuff sells. I gather the prevailing belief was that old TV programs wouldn't sell. Obviously we know now that's wrong, but TV was a very different world in the 1960s. The idea of the "re-run" was still relatively new. I'm not surprised the old guard didn't see the value, even going into the early 70s.
Also -- and here I'm speculating -- when it comes to copyrighted material, sometimes there are ownership issues that would need to be untangled. It's cheaper to just get rid of it than to pay a lawyer to sort it out. I have no idea if that played a part in any BBC purge, though.
The new National Defense Authorization Act contains an amendment allowing the military the authority to detain American citizens, on American soil, indefinitely and without access to an attorney.
What about subsection (e)? Wouldn't that argue against that interpretation?
There are certain inevitable trade-offs
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
From a classic Usenet "Computing Dictionary":
Easy to learn: Hard to use.
Easy to use: Hard to learn.
Easy to learn and use: Won't do what you want it to.
I'd call it a joke, but it's really rather apt. In most cases, there are trade-offs involved in UI designs. Make something flexible and powerful -- letting people do more -- and you necessarily make it more complicated, and harder to use. The more obvious and straight-forward you make a UI, the less you can pack into it.
Designing things that fit multiple user experience levels, and which transition cleanly, is hard.
This is one of the things I think the classic pull-down menu + toolbar paradigm does well. Sort things into categories, so like items are grouped. The accelerator keys for each menu item are highlighted, so as an intermediate step, you can remember (V)iew, (Z)oom, Whole (P)age. And shortcut keys are also displayed, so very frequently used commands give one the opportunity to remember something like [CTRL]+[0]. With icons next to the menu commands, you have an alternative shortcut for the mouse visually or mouse inclined.
Sadly, some people campaign actively against this kind of design, which facilities both novice and expert users. One complaint I read is that a Product Manager at Microsoft didn't like the underlined letters, saying novice users don't understand why letters are randomly underlined. While true, it also didn't really hurt them any. Meanwhile, removing the underlined letters prevents people who wish to do better from inquiring and improving themselves.
An advantage to GUIs is it lets those so inclined explore functionality. Hiding things removes that advantage. That's a loss.
Converting an established product, like Firefox, from a single- to multi-process architecture requires the involvement and coordination of many teams...
As I recall, with Mozilla 5.0, they scrapped a large part of the classic Netscape code base because it had become too unwieldy to maintain. Any significant change impacted many teams and subsystems. In technical terms, the code suffered from "low cohesion and high coupling". It sounds like we're there again.
(This happens to a lot of software projects, and has since the start. The field of software development is interesting in its frequent inability to learn from history.)
I can think of at least one human-like motive that might result in super-advanced aliens coming here and attacking us: Religion. At various times, various human religious groups have decided that everyone else has to Believe As We Do Or Die(TM). If humans are susceptible to this kind of mass hysteria, I have to at least admit the possibility that our hypothetical aliens might be, too.
This is not saying that Android or Playbook tablets are any better (we haven't even tried those yet), but iDevices aren't all lollypops and rainbows either.
That is the dumbest way of troubleshooting I have ever heard. You're troubleshooting a client issue on a server os, use a VM of windows 7, vista, xp whatever the client is running...
Not everything divides cleanly into "client" and "server", even in the best designs. Sometimes it's a network or transport issue. Being able to run the client on the server would make it easier to determine where things are going wrong. This is especially the case with MAPI, since before 2007 it's basically just a set of RPC calls into the Information Store structure.
I never understood the desire to remove tools from one's arsenal.
iPads are extremely easy for an enterprise to manage, because they integrate nicely into Exchange (e.g. you can define mail policies on your Exchange server, and iPads do what they're told - encrypt, require password lock, etc.).
We're not finding iPad/iPhone easy to manage at our business. The available management policies are very meager compared to BlackBerry handhelds. Too many things require iTunes, and iTunes is a bear to deploy, update, and manage. When the iDevice malfunctions, diagnostics and repair attempts are very limited. And if we need to do a service/warranty exchange, pain results. They won't ship an FRU; you have to go to a store. And apparently Apple's corporate policy forbids stores from telling customers if they have stock of FRUs, so the only way to find out is to drive to each store and try.
This is not saying that Android or Playbook tablets are any better (we haven't even tried those yet), but iDevices aren't all lollypops and rainbows either.
One of my complaints about Exchange (and indeed, Microsoft's products in general) is that they're full of bad interactions like that.
(My personal favorite is that installing Outlook (the Exchange client) on the same box as Exchange server causes the server to stop working. (For 2000 and 2003. Not sure on 2007+.) Not that I plan on reading email on the server, but for trouble-shooting it would be useful.)
You're pretty much forced to keep everything on separate servers if you want everything to work as designed.
Sure, in a good sized organization you'd be doing that anyway for performance, but in smaller orgs it's a real pain.
Out of interest, are there many computers down here on the planet that have been operating constantly for 34 years?
I'm sure there are embedded and industrial control systems that have been running that long, if only though sheer dumb luck. It would need reliable power, but there's a lot of that around. The computers that run security alarm systems come to mind. Most of them will have had something happen by now, but I bet someone's gotten lucky. Same for industrial control systems which have battery backup and run a continuous process.
Telecom would be another. The older digital telco switches are basically big computers. They're highly redundant and as simple as possible, and practically never go down. I'd bet money there are some with uptimes like that.
But the main reason I feel confident for saying so is that there are so many of those sorts of systems. With a large enough population, even rare events become common.
The Voyager craft are somewhat unique in that there are only two of them. (And they're not exactly reachable for sustaining maintenance.)
I never quite understood the moral panic that seems to appear when this comes up. Asking people to pay for what they use doesn't seem like *that* radical a concept to me.
* If you run more appliances, your electric bill goes up * If you drive a longer distance, you need to buy more gas * If you make a lot of cell phone calls, your bill goes up * If you eat more, you pay more for the groceries
Why is Internet use seen differently?
And before someone says, "I'm paying for X megabits/second, I should get that!", please understand that your feed connects you to the next upstream concentration point (switch, router, whatever). Beyond that, it's all shared bandwidth, and oversubscribed. That's one of the chief benefits of a packet-switched network -- you don't need to dedicate a circuit to each subscriber. Asking for dedicated connectivity the whole way[1] is asking for a return to the days of leased lines, where you paid thousands of dollars a month for 1.54 Mbit/sec.
[1] And, of course, the Internet doesn't have a "whole way".
Slashdot Mirror
a fictional story about a space mission.
... this has been done before.
Sure, a good story can overcome its cliches, but the fact that submitter apparently doesn't have the first clue about what to write about doesn't bode well for the "good story" part.
BMOC: Containment has almost nothing to do with cold shutdown.
According to TEPCO, it does:
TEPCO: Definition of "Cold Shutdown Condition": ... Release of radioactive materials from PCV is under control and public radiation exposure by additional release is being significantly held down.
(Roadmap towards Restoration from the Accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 17 Nov 2011, Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters, Government-TEPCO Integrated Response Office)
TEPCO *is* changing the standard definition of "cold shutdown" somewhat. Now, they have *added* a containment requirement, so they're not really loosening any standards. Of course, normally "cold shutdown" doesn't include a containment requirement because normally the reactor vessel isn't breached.
zeigerpuppy has a point in that "cold shutdown" normally implies a state of normal control. Cold shutdown typically means the reactor is stopped, doesn't need active cooling, and can be safely opened for maintenance. Fuku is still an active disaster site.
I'm not advocating panic (what's the sense in that?), but fair criticism of TEPCO is, I think, well-deserved.
Skeptics worry that the readings would be inaccurate if the melted fuel rods punctured their containment vessels and fell to the bottoms of the outer containment tanks. TEPCO has not been able to take direct measurements of the temperatures at the bottoms of the containment vessels, and the site is still too radioactive for the fuel rods' status to be visually confirmed.
("Skeptics cast doubt on Fukushima status, even as Japan declares nuclear reactors 'stable'", Arthur Bright, 16 DEC 2011, The Christian Science Monitor)
At least your reply was funny. :)
The biggest problem with Net Neutrality is that it isn't consistently defined. It means different things to different people. Indeed, in my experience, most of the people clamoring for Net Neutrality are very big about shouting "FREEDOM!!!!" like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. They love to complain that the big ISPs suck. But they're generally pretty short on specific ideas or completely-thought-through reasoning. This does not help.
Them: "Comcast sucks!"
Me: "Yes, they do. So what do you propose to do about it?"
Them: "Make them not suck!"
Me: "Okay, but how?"
Them: "Pass a law against them sucking."
Me: "Could you explain specifically what it is you want to prohibit?"
Them: "Everyone knows Comcast sucks!"
Me: *sigh*
While there are some people who can hold an intelligent conversation about this, they seem to be few and far between.
"Our two-party system is a bowl of shit looking at itself in the mirror."
Uh, unless something's changed, Verizon never had CarrierIQ to begin with.
Unless something's changed, VZW has denied using CarrierIQ, but has refused to explain why CarrierIQ was found to be connecting to servers with "vzw" in their names.
As a VZW customer, I'd be shocked if VZW wasn't doing something nefarious when it comes to customer monitoring. I'd also fully expect them to then lie about it.
Note well: This doesn't mean I'd trust Sprint (or AT&T or T-Mobile or whoever) over VZW. I wouldn't trust any of them.
Can anyone recommend any bank alternatives that are just handing out big bags of money to anyone who asks?
(Hint: Huge server farms and massive network connectivity have significant costs. (Misleading "YouTube's bandwidth bill is zero" headlines not withstanding.))
You might want to check your units there.
Yah, yah, I caught it after I posted. See my reply to my own post. Posted well before your reply, I might add. ;-)
Moving 3.5 trillion people to cities is not a realistic solution.
Brain fart. That should be "3.5 billion", not "3.5 trillion".
the correct answer is to move to the city.
You're somewhat out of touch with reality. Half the world's population lives in rural areas[1]. Moving 3.5 trillion people to cities is not a realistic solution.
Cites also have the problem that, if infrastructure fails, everybody dies. They're not "survivable", in military terms.
And some of us just like the country.
[1] http://esa.un.org/unup/p2k0data.asp
Anyone running anything older than XP-SP2 is either a dedicated hobbyist or a criminally negligent system administrator
At $WORK, we've got a CNC machine that runs Win 2000. Only. Moving to a newer Windows release requires replacing the entire control, to the tune of $20K. Guess what we're still running!
(One could argue that means it's a crappy product. Well, I'd agree. But in my experience, most computer products are crappy. Which leaves those of us wanting to get actual work done stuck holding the bag.)
That particular computer doesn't need a web browser, so no loss, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario where one would want HTML rendering, maybe even an interface to some web-based business automation system.
I had a lawyer who specializes in civil rights tell me no, it has big holes in it.
That doesn't surprise me.
Thanks for the info, most people I've asked that question to haven't even read the bill.
I can say from experience that it's often cheaper, from a liability and general management stand-point, to simply destroy something that it is to facilitate giving it away. I guess you'd be surprised how much of a clusterfsck giving something away can be. You have to deal with tons of requests, people complaining they didn't get what they want or should be first. If it's a physical give-away you need to handle physical security, crowd control, inventory, liability insurance. It's cheaper to just chuck it in a dumpster (or skip, rather since it's the BBC). Liability doesn't go away just because you say it's someone else's problem now.
An auction, well, that can recoup it's own operating costs, so that's a better idea -- but only if the stuff sells. I gather the prevailing belief was that old TV programs wouldn't sell. Obviously we know now that's wrong, but TV was a very different world in the 1960s. The idea of the "re-run" was still relatively new. I'm not surprised the old guard didn't see the value, even going into the early 70s.
Also -- and here I'm speculating -- when it comes to copyrighted material, sometimes there are ownership issues that would need to be untangled. It's cheaper to just get rid of it than to pay a lawyer to sort it out. I have no idea if that played a part in any BBC purge, though.
The new National Defense Authorization Act contains an amendment allowing the military the authority to detain American citizens, on American soil, indefinitely and without access to an attorney.
What about subsection (e)? Wouldn't that argue against that interpretation?
From a classic Usenet "Computing Dictionary":
Easy to learn: Hard to use.
Easy to use: Hard to learn.
Easy to learn and use: Won't do what you want it to.
I'd call it a joke, but it's really rather apt. In most cases, there are trade-offs involved in UI designs. Make something flexible and powerful -- letting people do more -- and you necessarily make it more complicated, and harder to use. The more obvious and straight-forward you make a UI, the less you can pack into it.
Designing things that fit multiple user experience levels, and which transition cleanly, is hard.
This is one of the things I think the classic pull-down menu + toolbar paradigm does well. Sort things into categories, so like items are grouped. The accelerator keys for each menu item are highlighted, so as an intermediate step, you can remember (V)iew, (Z)oom, Whole (P)age. And shortcut keys are also displayed, so very frequently used commands give one the opportunity to remember something like [CTRL]+[0]. With icons next to the menu commands, you have an alternative shortcut for the mouse visually or mouse inclined.
Sadly, some people campaign actively against this kind of design, which facilities both novice and expert users. One complaint I read is that a Product Manager at Microsoft didn't like the underlined letters, saying novice users don't understand why letters are randomly underlined. While true, it also didn't really hurt them any. Meanwhile, removing the underlined letters prevents people who wish to do better from inquiring and improving themselves.
An advantage to GUIs is it lets those so inclined explore functionality. Hiding things removes that advantage. That's a loss.
Converting an established product, like Firefox, from a single- to multi-process architecture requires the involvement and coordination of many teams...
As I recall, with Mozilla 5.0, they scrapped a large part of the classic Netscape code base because it had become too unwieldy to maintain. Any significant change impacted many teams and subsystems. In technical terms, the code suffered from "low cohesion and high coupling". It sounds like we're there again.
(This happens to a lot of software projects, and has since the start. The field of software development is interesting in its frequent inability to learn from history.)
Q: When will Windows 8 be released?
A: About six months before it's ready.
I can think of at least one human-like motive that might result in super-advanced aliens coming here and attacking us: Religion. At various times, various human religious groups have decided that everyone else has to Believe As We Do Or Die(TM). If humans are susceptible to this kind of mass hysteria, I have to at least admit the possibility that our hypothetical aliens might be, too.
I'll repeat for your benefit:
This is not saying that Android or Playbook tablets are any better (we haven't even tried those yet), but iDevices aren't all lollypops and rainbows either.
That is the dumbest way of troubleshooting I have ever heard. You're troubleshooting a client issue on a server os, use a VM of windows 7, vista, xp whatever the client is running...
Not everything divides cleanly into "client" and "server", even in the best designs. Sometimes it's a network or transport issue. Being able to run the client on the server would make it easier to determine where things are going wrong. This is especially the case with MAPI, since before 2007 it's basically just a set of RPC calls into the Information Store structure.
I never understood the desire to remove tools from one's arsenal.
iPads are extremely easy for an enterprise to manage, because they integrate nicely into Exchange (e.g. you can define mail policies on your Exchange server, and iPads do what they're told - encrypt, require password lock, etc.).
We're not finding iPad/iPhone easy to manage at our business. The available management policies are very meager compared to BlackBerry handhelds. Too many things require iTunes, and iTunes is a bear to deploy, update, and manage. When the iDevice malfunctions, diagnostics and repair attempts are very limited. And if we need to do a service/warranty exchange, pain results. They won't ship an FRU; you have to go to a store. And apparently Apple's corporate policy forbids stores from telling customers if they have stock of FRUs, so the only way to find out is to drive to each store and try.
This is not saying that Android or Playbook tablets are any better (we haven't even tried those yet), but iDevices aren't all lollypops and rainbows either.
One of my complaints about Exchange (and indeed, Microsoft's products in general) is that they're full of bad interactions like that.
(My personal favorite is that installing Outlook (the Exchange client) on the same box as Exchange server causes the server to stop working. (For 2000 and 2003. Not sure on 2007+.) Not that I plan on reading email on the server, but for trouble-shooting it would be useful.)
You're pretty much forced to keep everything on separate servers if you want everything to work as designed.
Sure, in a good sized organization you'd be doing that anyway for performance, but in smaller orgs it's a real pain.
Out of interest, are there many computers down here on the planet that have been operating constantly for 34 years?
I'm sure there are embedded and industrial control systems that have been running that long, if only though sheer dumb luck. It would need reliable power, but there's a lot of that around. The computers that run security alarm systems come to mind. Most of them will have had something happen by now, but I bet someone's gotten lucky. Same for industrial control systems which have battery backup and run a continuous process.
Telecom would be another. The older digital telco switches are basically big computers. They're highly redundant and as simple as possible, and practically never go down. I'd bet money there are some with uptimes like that.
But the main reason I feel confident for saying so is that there are so many of those sorts of systems. With a large enough population, even rare events become common.
The Voyager craft are somewhat unique in that there are only two of them . (And they're not exactly reachable for sustaining maintenance.)
I never quite understood the moral panic that seems to appear when this comes up. Asking people to pay for what they use doesn't seem like *that* radical a concept to me.
* If you run more appliances, your electric bill goes up
* If you drive a longer distance, you need to buy more gas
* If you make a lot of cell phone calls, your bill goes up
* If you eat more, you pay more for the groceries
Why is Internet use seen differently?
And before someone says, "I'm paying for X megabits/second, I should get that!", please understand that your feed connects you to the next upstream concentration point (switch, router, whatever). Beyond that, it's all shared bandwidth, and oversubscribed. That's one of the chief benefits of a packet-switched network -- you don't need to dedicate a circuit to each subscriber. Asking for dedicated connectivity the whole way[1] is asking for a return to the days of leased lines, where you paid thousands of dollars a month for 1.54 Mbit/sec.
[1] And, of course, the Internet doesn't have a "whole way".