The Linux community aren't exactly top of the pops in the corporate world, much in fact due to their rather immature birdlike mascot.
Yeah, that's it. When I installed Windows XP Pro, I got a cute little frog as my login icon, and my wife got at cute little yellow rubber duck. So that must be why Windows is losing ground in the corporate sphere. Not!
Wait, that's only a thousand watts at a half amp. That's not particularly dangerous. [...] In the States, if you're not doing new home construction or industrial work you're not dealing with dangerous current.
You know in climing circles we call the above display of bravado "evolution in action". See you in an emergency ward near your home any time now.
Now lest someone other than you will take your word for it, electricity is a lot more dangerous than what one is led to believe by the above. For example, the minimum AC current that can cause fibrilation of the heart is ca 60 mA, around 100 mA you're sure that your heart will stop pumping (though stopping the heart outright is more difficult.)
That's just the beginnings of biological effects of electricity (there are frequency dependencies, e.g. the US 60 Hz system is in fact slightly less safe than the European 50 Hz system, though probably not enough to count, esp when you factor in the higher voltages here).
The interested reader can find lots of useful information by Googling, real information I might add, not just the garden variety "don't do it" advice that doesn't really tell you anything about what is safe and what isn't. Working safely with electrical circuits isn't that much more difficult (or time consuming) than risking killing yourself (for no good reason I might add, you're trying to fix a lamp, not climb K2). Inform yourself.
Re:Each has their own advantages
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Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
I assumed the question was something earlier in the thread, "there is nothing a shuttle can do that soyuz + iss can't, and then some."
Fair enough. Though that wasn't quite my perspective. Mine is more "why keep throwing good money after bad".
So if you deny me my brand spanking two ton reentry vehicle, I'll have to go back to; there's nothing worth deorbiting that weighs more than what you could pack on today, anyway. Nothing worth deorbiting in one piece that is.;-)
Re:Each has their own advantages
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Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 4, Interesting
How do you bring back more that a few hundred kg from orbit?
As you said yourself two of the arguments don't really hold. There just isn't any money in reparing satelites, LEO or geosynchronous, just lanuch a new one. And geography takes care of the rest. There is one left though, return of heavy objects. Granted it's not that much of an issue, what heavy objects are there to be returned in one piece? A few hundred kilos will go a long way towards deorbiting anything worthwhile. There simply isn't hundreds of tons sitting up there waiting to come down.
But the answer is not that hard anyway. You design something that does deorbit a ton or two (it's not that hard to do). I'd bet that that could be done cheaper than the cost of a few shuttle flights. You only need a large enough parachute (perhaps metal vanes initially) and landing it in the ocean. Since there's no people involved landing shock etc can be much higher.
Looking at the dollars involved, the cheap thing is probably to scrap the existing shuttle fleet, and redesign non-reusable craft to go atop existing US rockets. Granted they weren't built for manned flight, but operational records aren't that bad for some of the more tried and tested designs.
Hell, if memory serves the Titan IV is cheaper per shot than a shuttle launch, and you don't even have to bother about what to do with the junk once you've used it!;-)
Re:Each has their own advantages
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Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
IIRC, one of the reasons those items went up on the shuttle was because the rockets weren't capable at the time of carring a large, hubble-sized, satellite.
But that's putting the cart before the horse. That there wasn't anything available isn't surprising if you've developped a shuttle to do just that kind of thing. If you hadn't, you could have built a rocket (and much cheaper) to do the same thing better.
A testament to this is of course the fact that there exists rockets today in the US (the Titan IV has a LEO lift capacity of 17 tons, the Hubble a mass of about 11 tons). Rockets that were developed despite the fact that the shuttle was available, since the shuttle is too expensive (and hasn't got the omph to lift anything into geo synchronous orbit anyway).
Space exploration is why we send 7 people up there on a regular basis. We don't understand what's up there, we want to find out.
Well, that's fine and dandy, but since the shuttle never makes it above LEO (low earth orbit), there's not that much there to see that hasn't been seen before...
So if you insist on sending people to LEO just because you can, why not do it safely and cheaply in a non reusable orbiter, carried on top of a old fashioned rocket.
As others have mentioned the Soyuz has a remarkable safety record, and it was built and operated by the Soviets, not usually held in high regard in safety engineering circles (just look at the disaster waiting to happen that is the RBMK nuclear reactor, and the list goes on and on).
And now that you have the international space station for extended stays, you don't even need a big vehicle you can camp in while doing whatever you want to do. Shuttle people to and from the space station in a simple cheap non-reusable craft, send the parts to build it by unmanned heavy lift rockets, and do something exiting with the money left over, such as exploring space. Something the shuttle has had very little to do with I might add. No interplanetary mission was ever lift off by the shuttle.
Re:Each has their own advantages
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Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
I think you're a little mistaken there. You'd be extremely hard pressed to see a soyuz put hubble into space, or chandra, or any of the ISS modules.
And why should you want to? Heaving lifting of dead objects is for unmanned rockets.
If there's no need for human intervention, why oh why build a craft capable of harbouring one. It's just a waste of money. The rocket can be built larger, cheaper and doesn't have to be that reliable, since loss of life is not at stake.
No, the now quite old quip that "If the space shuttle was the answer, what was the question?" still applies.
I know in my area that someone who is a real expert in W2K will cost around £30k/year and I'd have a choice of them, yet the cost for a Red Hat specialist is -far- more expensive. It's more in the £40k region at least, and I'd not have many to choose from. Therefore, the cost of the software is beset by the personnel costs.
You're completely ignoring the difference in effectiveness between W2K admistration and RedHat administration.
If my experiences are anything to go by, and I work at a major multinational (you've heard about it) that employs both Solaris/Linux and W2K, the number of people you need to administrate W2K seats compared to the same number of UNIX seats far outweigh the difference in salary. I.e. you need about 2 to 3 times as many W2K admins as you need UNIX/Linux admins for the same user base (and server applications). The higher figure is for workstation admins and the lower is for server admins.
And that's going from a workstation to win2k desktop environment, i.e. not taking advantage of any remote/thin clients on the desktop. Granted the difference is smaller when it comes to server admins, but still much too large.
Now, admittedly, we employ thousands of them, and that's a difference from your scenario that only speaks of hiring one. Of course you cannot hire less than one if you expect a full time staffed position, but consider that you might not have to, you could go part time (maybe share with someone else), co-locate servers elsewhere (buy managed service) etc. There are options even if you are a much smaller outfit.
So yes there may be more available, and they may come cheaper, but in my not so humble experience you'll need more of them, more than enough to offset any difference in salary and then some.
Re:Yes it sounds like a plain old slashdotting.
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SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I'm sure you'd much rather live in the world ruled by either North Korea or Saddam's Iraq.
Rather than living in a world ruled by the US you mean?
You know, I'd rather live in a world which is ruled by all democratic nations, or at least no nation in particular.
But with a Bush in the Whitehouse, and apologists such as yourself, that's aparently much too much to hope for.
a rifle intended to kill large numbers of people efficiently (as opposed to animals).
Well, that would also match a main battle rifle, i.e. the likes of the H&K G3, the FN FAL etc. These fire a larger caliber cartridge, 7.62 NATO in this particular case. And I don't know about the 'large', the infantry man in the first line of assault isn't projected to 'remain effective' (euphemism alert) that long in any serious engagement.
The 'assault' is there for a reason. I.e. it's a rifle/carbine that is meant to be used in the assault, as opposed to the defence. As such it is lighter, easier to handle. One of the original design requirements of the AK-47 was that it was to be possible to fire it effectively from the hip, on the move. Which incidentally made it more difficult to shoot well from the shoulder.
Compare if you will the difference between the offensive and defensive handgrenade. Where the offensive is ligther and produces less shrappnel, while the opposite is true of the defensive grenade.
P.S. And while we're at it. What is commonly refered to as the AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova accepted in 1947), hasn't been produced in a long time. A redesign in the fifties, exchanging the milled reciever for a stamped one among other things, produced the AKM which has been the dominating version at least up till the introduction of the AK-74 (which is chambered for a different cartridge).
Re:Clarifying false assumptions
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Secret Empire
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· Score: 1
Not false, but true. And very good. The Soviets had installed a dictator, and the U.S. came to Guatemala's aid and kicked the colonialists out.
You're riding roughshod over history there: Arbenz was legaly elected, by the democratic election in 1950.
He did try to make United Fruit stop behaving badly, up to threatening and effecting nationalisation as part of land reforms, and that was his undoing.
You can be a fascist/communist/environmentalist all you like and the US government will leave you alone, but you fuck with US corporate interests overseas at your own peril.
Yes he did declare dictatorship, but that was years after the CIA had effected operation PBFORTUNE, which called for his overthrowing by civil unrest (and the killing of himself and his supporters). Leading to a political climate that wasn't really compatible with holding elections then and there.
Democracy is fragile, you need only look at Iran '53, Guatemala '54 or Chile '73 to learn that. Ike himself is said to have commented on the fact that he could overthrow foreign governments without having to fire a single shot to be just "dandy".
Re:Military Industrial Complex
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Secret Empire
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Don't confuse conspicious use with "giving rise" to tech.
Well I dunno. It was the officially stated reason anyway. That Kernighan and Thompson really wanted to play computergames and needed an excuse doesn't really invalidate the original supposition, that the military had nothing to do with it.
The military had everything to do with Multics though, out of the frustration of which, UNIX grew.
I have two levels of security - stuff I don't really care about (i.e. NYTimes or Yahoo registration), and stuff I do (i.e. work computer).
Funny me to. Stuff I care about such as Yahoo and NYTimes, and stuff I couldn't give a rats ass about, such as work...
And I bet that most of those surveyed are like me. I may go through the motions, some of them, when it comes to my employer, but I'll be fucked if I care. And doing a PhD in computer security I'd really ought to know better.
When I teach security I always remind the students that people will spare no effort to find a way around security measures they don't see the point of. And that's a interesting observation in and of itself, it's not that they'll take the easy way out, they'll gladly do more work to stick it to the man.
And therefore it's my belief that forced changes and password histories and the like will actually reduce your password security. Such policies will make the few who actually choose good passwords and don't write them down to begin with, choose a simple and easily guessable password to have any chance of keeping up.
I think that without constantly having to change your password, having only one company wide password (even if technology doesn't allow it tell everyone to use the same), users could be persuaded to use good passwords. Then the time they invested in one wouldn't immediately go to waste.
The next step would be to hand out generated passwords, and give people a sticker with it, for the back of their drivers licenses (it would work in Sweden at least, no-one ever needs to see it in the rest of society, most people never remove it from their wallets). Since most people care more for their drivers licenses than their company password, you'd see few laying about. Yes, everyone would know where to look for them, but I'm not convinced this would decrease security compared to today. And again with reasonable password expirations (say two years) many people could be persuaded to commit one to memory.
This is only to tidy us over until some form of token can be put into it's place. Link login to peoples company ID's (perhaps with a short pin) and many of the problems encountered here would be a thing of the past. Insiders would still be a problem, but outsiders couldn't gain access just by phoning random people.
Of course it's undoable today, physical access and computer security is not typically handled by the same organisation, and if it is it's invariably the wrong organisation (from a comp. sec. perspective), i.e. the physical security people aka retired cops, who themselves more often than not couldn't give a rats ass about computer security...
Also on the issue of oil infrastructure I would like to add that the issue isn't with the pitiful current Iraqi oil infrastructure. It's with the potentially huge future Iraqi oil infrastructure.
What everyone seems to be forgetting with "their annual oil income is only 1/20 of what the war cost" is that Iraq has the largest known oil reserves outside Saudi Arabia. What they don't have currently is a production to matches those supplies. And they never had one.
The situation in Saudi Arabia is volatile, remember that the 9/11 terrorist (and Osama) were Saudis (with the odd Egyptian thrown in), an Islamic revolution there would leave the US with their pants around their ankles, oil wise. Even accepting the 25% figure, that's a huge percentage to suddenly do without. And furthermore, focusing on total energy usage ignores that you've built most on your transportation infrastructure on the abundance of cheap oil derivates. Hit that that hard, and your (already shaky) economy could collapse. Unfortunately you'd take us with you...
Given that, what better place to increase your influence than the other oil rich nation in the world? Let's not forget that the only nation in the world that can survive on its own oil resources is Russia. The US has increased its consumption over the last couple of years, not decreased it.
Let me put it this way, if the war in Iraq isn't an oil grab, it damn well ought to be, from an American perspective. A perspective I don't happen to share (or agree with), BTW.
No. Though I do hope Iraq will get a functioning democracy, and while I'm absolutely positive that somebody in Iraq will be in control of the oil reserves by that time, it was never about direct control by the US government. The cynic in me says that it was always about deposing Saddam and putting someone friendly to US interests in control. That same cynic also keeps whispering that there is no way a democracy would be allowed to succeed. Democracies have an uncanny knack of acting in the best interests of their voters, not US corporate interests.
Yeah, well, it's a while ago now, but just look at what happened to Mosadeque in Iran (the democratically elected prime minister) when he tried to stop BP.
Or the democracy of Guatemala in '56 when they tried to put a stop to United Fruit. They still haven't really recovered, and of course Iran hasn't returned to democracy either.
Everyone is obsessed with breasts. Men want them. Women want them. Breasts are absolutely beautiful. What does this have to do with anything?
Well, that was my point exactly. Here in Europe, an attorney general with a semi nude statue in the backdrop would be no big deal.
I remember watching news footage from the rivera on US TV, and all the brests were covered over by a black little strip (you know, the kind that usually covers eyes of criminal suspects and the like). I laughed my ass off all the while my american hosts couldn't understand what was so funny. Topless on the beach is no big deal here.
Now, if you're so obsessed with them, why do you insist on having to have them covered up all the time?
No effect yet traced, but cautious researchers saying not finding something is not the same as proving it doesn't exist, which the worried then take as an assertion it does exist.
Mobiles are limited to ?1 watt?.
Close, GSM is 2W maximum. There is a power control loop though, so they're usually much lower, in the 100 mW range. About 70% of the energy is absorbed by your head with current designs. And cancer may not be the problem, se below.
And there is no conclusive study linking cancer to mobile phone use. However, it's still early days yet, we used mobiles on a larger scale for scarcely ten years. Cancers usually take longer to manifest themselves.
Now, in your Sun argument you make the common fallacy of just looking at the energy transmitted, not taking into account that biological effects often depend on frequency and other parameters. Take the Sun for example. While same wattage X from a light bulb (high in IR and low in UV) would do nothing to your head, the same amount of Solar radiation will cause cancer. Clear frequency dependency here.
And it's the same with lower frequency radiation from mobiles. While the energy transmitted probably is safe, from a purely heat perspective, at least with our current knowledge. Two recent reports link this type of non-ionising radition to opening the blood-brain barrier, to the protein albumin. Albumin kills brain cells perhaps by letting heavy metals tag along, and this effect has been demonstrated on rats. Note that there's no cancer here, just dementia.
Now, this research is still in its early stages, the rat is an imperfect model of the human just to make one point, but it's an interesting result non the less.
The article clearly says that Ashcroft had nothing to do with the decision.
No it doesn't, it actually quotes a dept. of justice spokesman as saying that Ashcroft has nothing to do with the decision "because he has more important things to worry about." Big difference.
Now, wheter you choose to belive said spokesperson is another matter entirely. If it's really as people here say, that photographers have been bending over themselves to get the shot with conservative Ashcroft in the foreground and breast in the bakground (what is it with you americans and breasts anyway), I'd be very surprised if Ashcroft wasn't driving the change. To be a high ranking politician in one of the most cut-throat environments in the world, and not worry or care enough about your public image (or the perception of said, at best a distraction as someone else here said) to control a photo op such as this one, would be naive to say the least.
To think that someone like Ashcroft has gotten this far without managing his image carefully is naive as well.
Now, whether Ashcroft made this particular decision himself, or actually has people on staff to do it for him is less of an issue, he's still the man behind it, he has to be. That's not to say that it's unbelievable he did. Politicians usually look to image first (i.e. tend to it themselves), and the rest second (IMHO), so this is indeed an issue that I'd be surprised if it didn't get run by him.
First of all, anyone running a science class who thinks that forcing a bunch of rote formula memorization is "learning" isn't doing very much teaching.
Second of all, everybody that actually makes a living with math and science cheats every day, by referring to reference books, studies, conferring with others, and so on.
We should be teaching people how to *learn* by using reference materials, not waste storage neurons on things that are already written down.
Well, I used to be of that opinion too, then my first job was for a research laboratory, and it turned out that the school situation is a poor approximation for "real" work.
It turned out that the only mathematics I really had any use for was the one I had in my head. Why? Because hunkered down in the lab, discussing the setup or partial result of an experiment, you had to be able to think on your feet, to quickly come up with, and rule out, different hypotheses about what was going on, what effect we were seeing (as opposed to what effect we were trying to see).
Running off to my office and coming back 20 minutes later with the calculation in hand wouldn't have helped, the discussion would already have moved on.
That's not to say that there wasn't times when I sat alone on in my chambers with all the support you mention (computers, reference literature etc). But that was for the final write up of the results. By that time I already knew what the answer was going to be, since we had already done most of it in our collective heads as the experiment was running. That last write up was more a check to see that everything worked out than coming up with new angles. (And whenever a new angle came up that late in the game, it was either the subject of another experiment, or invalidated the one we had just performed).
I guestimate that I did no more than 10-20% of the calculations in my office, the rest was on the fly.
I would say that even stoping and taking the time to use a calculator during a meeting (impromptu or organised) is pushing your luck. If you cannot follow the discussion doing "back of the envelope" estimates in your head (depending on the field your in you might have to have a precision of from anywhere between 1-100%) you're out of the discussion.
Feynman has waxed on more eloquently than I on this very subject. Even though he's more hard core in this respect than I would like to be.
Now, in the rest of my career, as a CS/CE, I've solved exactly one first order integral since, so from that perspective you're right. References came in handy there, but that's not to say that I have a working knowledge of mathematics today.
This is somewhat ortoghonal to the question of whether we should teach children to learn using reference material and the like, I'm all with you there. Unfortunately, the way things stand, it should be drummed into most children, not to let school stand in the way of their education, but that's a different matter.
You shot your missles or whatever, your opponent shot his missles, you both shot countermeasures, and then you waited 3 weeks to see if you were going to die.
Not to mention no FTL-travel per se. You could jump to different parts of space through worm holes (compressors?), but with relativistic effects, you might end up meeting enemies from the 'future relatively speaking. Or from the 'past.'
Made for some 'interesting' engagements. (Or rather 'uninteresting' engagements, since the opponenents would'nt be matched.)
But speaking of zipping by, there was this one engagement where a smaller friendly ship feigned retreat, slingshotted around the compressor, came back with a huge velocity vector (effecting surprise), killed the alien ship, and then spent months retarding and turning back to pick up the survivors from the planet the battle was all about.
The chip still cycles the same even if it's doing less work.
No it doesn't. I quote "hlt - Halts CPU until RESET line is activated, NMI or maskable interrupt received. The CPU becomes dormant but retains the current CS:IP for later restart." That's why it's called the (surprise) halt-intruction.
There is no advantage to keeping the processor idle as long as it is within its working temperature range, it won't increase the life of your chip even a little bit. And the money save in electricity would add up to maybe 10 cents a year. Stupid Fucking Cunt.
The powersavings are substantial. A modern AMD ( e.g 2500+) has a current draw of 41.4 A in execution state, and only 7.2 A in stop grant state (powersaving 'hlt' with bus disconnect). Since power depends on current squared (it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's close enough for someone of your limited capacity), the powersavings are indeed substantial.
If you save only 80 W, over a year of 24/7 that adds up to about $40 where I live, which is again an order of magnitude more than you calculated.
And if you really believe that operating temperature doesn't have anything to do with life span, even when operating within the specified tolerances, you still have a bit of semiconductor physics to learn (hint 'kT' crops up again and again). Cooler is always better. (For cool enough the projected life span may be enough for one not to matter, but again if you think that running your AMD at the stated 80C continously is a good idea, well, what do I care, be my guest). Again this is a simplification, and again it's clearly good enough for you.
Now be a good boy and hit the books, you're welcome back when you actually know something.
I'm confused.. if you don't use CPU cycles, they are somehow saved up?
Don't be confused, you're on a geek site remember? Just read up on the 'hlt' instruction on intel's website. There you'll learn that the unused cycles are in fact saved up; by lowering the energy consumption and hence temperature of the CPU. This lower temperature in turn adding up to a longer life of your processor.
The cheaper electricity bill is just an added bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
Not on the AMD, which has an exclusive cache.
So it's the MS-DOS and application executing completely on chip. Someone post benchmarks please. ;-)
Yeah, that's it. When I installed Windows XP Pro, I got a cute little frog as my login icon, and my wife got at cute little yellow rubber duck. So that must be why Windows is losing ground in the corporate sphere. Not!
You know in climing circles we call the above display of bravado "evolution in action". See you in an emergency ward near your home any time now.
Now lest someone other than you will take your word for it, electricity is a lot more dangerous than what one is led to believe by the above. For example, the minimum AC current that can cause fibrilation of the heart is ca 60 mA, around 100 mA you're sure that your heart will stop pumping (though stopping the heart outright is more difficult.)
That's just the beginnings of biological effects of electricity (there are frequency dependencies, e.g. the US 60 Hz system is in fact slightly less safe than the European 50 Hz system, though probably not enough to count, esp when you factor in the higher voltages here).
The interested reader can find lots of useful information by Googling, real information I might add, not just the garden variety "don't do it" advice that doesn't really tell you anything about what is safe and what isn't. Working safely with electrical circuits isn't that much more difficult (or time consuming) than risking killing yourself (for no good reason I might add, you're trying to fix a lamp, not climb K2). Inform yourself.
Fair enough. Though that wasn't quite my perspective. Mine is more "why keep throwing good money after bad".
So if you deny me my brand spanking two ton reentry vehicle, I'll have to go back to; there's nothing worth deorbiting that weighs more than what you could pack on today, anyway. Nothing worth deorbiting in one piece that is. ;-)
As you said yourself two of the arguments don't really hold. There just isn't any money in reparing satelites, LEO or geosynchronous, just lanuch a new one. And geography takes care of the rest. There is one left though, return of heavy objects. Granted it's not that much of an issue, what heavy objects are there to be returned in one piece? A few hundred kilos will go a long way towards deorbiting anything worthwhile. There simply isn't hundreds of tons sitting up there waiting to come down.
But the answer is not that hard anyway. You design something that does deorbit a ton or two (it's not that hard to do). I'd bet that that could be done cheaper than the cost of a few shuttle flights. You only need a large enough parachute (perhaps metal vanes initially) and landing it in the ocean. Since there's no people involved landing shock etc can be much higher.
Looking at the dollars involved, the cheap thing is probably to scrap the existing shuttle fleet, and redesign non-reusable craft to go atop existing US rockets. Granted they weren't built for manned flight, but operational records aren't that bad for some of the more tried and tested designs.
Hell, if memory serves the Titan IV is cheaper per shot than a shuttle launch, and you don't even have to bother about what to do with the junk once you've used it! ;-)
But that's putting the cart before the horse. That there wasn't anything available isn't surprising if you've developped a shuttle to do just that kind of thing. If you hadn't, you could have built a rocket (and much cheaper) to do the same thing better.
A testament to this is of course the fact that there exists rockets today in the US (the Titan IV has a LEO lift capacity of 17 tons, the Hubble a mass of about 11 tons). Rockets that were developed despite the fact that the shuttle was available, since the shuttle is too expensive (and hasn't got the omph to lift anything into geo synchronous orbit anyway).
Well, that's fine and dandy, but since the shuttle never makes it above LEO (low earth orbit), there's not that much there to see that hasn't been seen before...
So if you insist on sending people to LEO just because you can, why not do it safely and cheaply in a non reusable orbiter, carried on top of a old fashioned rocket.
As others have mentioned the Soyuz has a remarkable safety record, and it was built and operated by the Soviets, not usually held in high regard in safety engineering circles (just look at the disaster waiting to happen that is the RBMK nuclear reactor, and the list goes on and on).
And now that you have the international space station for extended stays, you don't even need a big vehicle you can camp in while doing whatever you want to do. Shuttle people to and from the space station in a simple cheap non-reusable craft, send the parts to build it by unmanned heavy lift rockets, and do something exiting with the money left over, such as exploring space. Something the shuttle has had very little to do with I might add. No interplanetary mission was ever lift off by the shuttle.
And why should you want to? Heaving lifting of dead objects is for unmanned rockets.
If there's no need for human intervention, why oh why build a craft capable of harbouring one. It's just a waste of money. The rocket can be built larger, cheaper and doesn't have to be that reliable, since loss of life is not at stake.
No, the now quite old quip that "If the space shuttle was the answer, what was the question?" still applies.
You're completely ignoring the difference in effectiveness between W2K admistration and RedHat administration.
If my experiences are anything to go by, and I work at a major multinational (you've heard about it) that employs both Solaris/Linux and W2K, the number of people you need to administrate W2K seats compared to the same number of UNIX seats far outweigh the difference in salary. I.e. you need about 2 to 3 times as many W2K admins as you need UNIX/Linux admins for the same user base (and server applications). The higher figure is for workstation admins and the lower is for server admins.
And that's going from a workstation to win2k desktop environment, i.e. not taking advantage of any remote/thin clients on the desktop. Granted the difference is smaller when it comes to server admins, but still much too large.
Now, admittedly, we employ thousands of them, and that's a difference from your scenario that only speaks of hiring one. Of course you cannot hire less than one if you expect a full time staffed position, but consider that you might not have to, you could go part time (maybe share with someone else), co-locate servers elsewhere (buy managed service) etc. There are options even if you are a much smaller outfit.
So yes there may be more available, and they may come cheaper, but in my not so humble experience you'll need more of them, more than enough to offset any difference in salary and then some.
Rather than living in a world ruled by the US you mean?
You know, I'd rather live in a world which is ruled by all democratic nations, or at least no nation in particular.
But with a Bush in the Whitehouse, and apologists such as yourself, that's aparently much too much to hope for.
Good link!
Well, that would also match a main battle rifle, i.e. the likes of the H&K G3, the FN FAL etc. These fire a larger caliber cartridge, 7.62 NATO in this particular case. And I don't know about the 'large', the infantry man in the first line of assault isn't projected to 'remain effective' (euphemism alert) that long in any serious engagement.
The 'assault' is there for a reason. I.e. it's a rifle/carbine that is meant to be used in the assault, as opposed to the defence. As such it is lighter, easier to handle. One of the original design requirements of the AK-47 was that it was to be possible to fire it effectively from the hip, on the move. Which incidentally made it more difficult to shoot well from the shoulder.
Compare if you will the difference between the offensive and defensive handgrenade. Where the offensive is ligther and produces less shrappnel, while the opposite is true of the defensive grenade.
P.S. And while we're at it. What is commonly refered to as the AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikova accepted in 1947), hasn't been produced in a long time. A redesign in the fifties, exchanging the milled reciever for a stamped one among other things, produced the AKM which has been the dominating version at least up till the introduction of the AK-74 (which is chambered for a different cartridge).
You're riding roughshod over history there: Arbenz was legaly elected, by the democratic election in 1950.
He did try to make United Fruit stop behaving badly, up to threatening and effecting nationalisation as part of land reforms, and that was his undoing.
You can be a fascist/communist/environmentalist all you like and the US government will leave you alone, but you fuck with US corporate interests overseas at your own peril.
Yes he did declare dictatorship, but that was years after the CIA had effected operation PBFORTUNE, which called for his overthrowing by civil unrest (and the killing of himself and his supporters). Leading to a political climate that wasn't really compatible with holding elections then and there.
Democracy is fragile, you need only look at Iran '53, Guatemala '54 or Chile '73 to learn that. Ike himself is said to have commented on the fact that he could overthrow foreign governments without having to fire a single shot to be just "dandy".
Well I dunno. It was the officially stated reason anyway. That Kernighan and Thompson really wanted to play computergames and needed an excuse doesn't really invalidate the original supposition, that the military had nothing to do with it.
The military had everything to do with Multics though, out of the frustration of which, UNIX grew.
Funny me to. Stuff I care about such as Yahoo and NYTimes, and stuff I couldn't give a rats ass about, such as work ...
And I bet that most of those surveyed are like me. I may go through the motions, some of them, when it comes to my employer, but I'll be fucked if I care. And doing a PhD in computer security I'd really ought to know better.
When I teach security I always remind the students that people will spare no effort to find a way around security measures they don't see the point of. And that's a interesting observation in and of itself, it's not that they'll take the easy way out, they'll gladly do more work to stick it to the man.
And therefore it's my belief that forced changes and password histories and the like will actually reduce your password security. Such policies will make the few who actually choose good passwords and don't write them down to begin with, choose a simple and easily guessable password to have any chance of keeping up.
I think that without constantly having to change your password, having only one company wide password (even if technology doesn't allow it tell everyone to use the same), users could be persuaded to use good passwords. Then the time they invested in one wouldn't immediately go to waste.
The next step would be to hand out generated passwords, and give people a sticker with it, for the back of their drivers licenses (it would work in Sweden at least, no-one ever needs to see it in the rest of society, most people never remove it from their wallets). Since most people care more for their drivers licenses than their company password, you'd see few laying about. Yes, everyone would know where to look for them, but I'm not convinced this would decrease security compared to today. And again with reasonable password expirations (say two years) many people could be persuaded to commit one to memory.
This is only to tidy us over until some form of token can be put into it's place. Link login to peoples company ID's (perhaps with a short pin) and many of the problems encountered here would be a thing of the past. Insiders would still be a problem, but outsiders couldn't gain access just by phoning random people.
Of course it's undoable today, physical access and computer security is not typically handled by the same organisation, and if it is it's invariably the wrong organisation (from a comp. sec. perspective), i.e. the physical security people aka retired cops, who themselves more often than not couldn't give a rats ass about computer security...
Also on the issue of oil infrastructure I would like to add that the issue isn't with the pitiful current Iraqi oil infrastructure. It's with the potentially huge future Iraqi oil infrastructure.
What everyone seems to be forgetting with "their annual oil income is only 1/20 of what the war cost" is that Iraq has the largest known oil reserves outside Saudi Arabia. What they don't have currently is a production to matches those supplies. And they never had one.
The situation in Saudi Arabia is volatile, remember that the 9/11 terrorist (and Osama) were Saudis (with the odd Egyptian thrown in), an Islamic revolution there would leave the US with their pants around their ankles, oil wise. Even accepting the 25% figure, that's a huge percentage to suddenly do without. And furthermore, focusing on total energy usage ignores that you've built most on your transportation infrastructure on the abundance of cheap oil derivates. Hit that that hard, and your (already shaky) economy could collapse. Unfortunately you'd take us with you...
Given that, what better place to increase your influence than the other oil rich nation in the world? Let's not forget that the only nation in the world that can survive on its own oil resources is Russia. The US has increased its consumption over the last couple of years, not decreased it.
Let me put it this way, if the war in Iraq isn't an oil grab, it damn well ought to be, from an American perspective. A perspective I don't happen to share (or agree with), BTW.
Yeah, well, it's a while ago now, but just look at what happened to Mosadeque in Iran (the democratically elected prime minister) when he tried to stop BP.
Or the democracy of Guatemala in '56 when they tried to put a stop to United Fruit. They still haven't really recovered, and of course Iran hasn't returned to democracy either.
Let's hope there's been progress since then.
Well, that was my point exactly. Here in Europe, an attorney general with a semi nude statue in the backdrop would be no big deal.
I remember watching news footage from the rivera on US TV, and all the brests were covered over by a black little strip (you know, the kind that usually covers eyes of criminal suspects and the like). I laughed my ass off all the while my american hosts couldn't understand what was so funny. Topless on the beach is no big deal here.
Now, if you're so obsessed with them, why do you insist on having to have them covered up all the time?
Close, GSM is 2W maximum. There is a power control loop though, so they're usually much lower, in the 100 mW range. About 70% of the energy is absorbed by your head with current designs. And cancer may not be the problem, se below.
And there is no conclusive study linking cancer to mobile phone use. However, it's still early days yet, we used mobiles on a larger scale for scarcely ten years. Cancers usually take longer to manifest themselves.
Now, in your Sun argument you make the common fallacy of just looking at the energy transmitted, not taking into account that biological effects often depend on frequency and other parameters. Take the Sun for example. While same wattage X from a light bulb (high in IR and low in UV) would do nothing to your head, the same amount of Solar radiation will cause cancer. Clear frequency dependency here.
And it's the same with lower frequency radiation from mobiles. While the energy transmitted probably is safe, from a purely heat perspective, at least with our current knowledge. Two recent reports link this type of non-ionising radition to opening the blood-brain barrier, to the protein albumin. Albumin kills brain cells perhaps by letting heavy metals tag along, and this effect has been demonstrated on rats. Note that there's no cancer here, just dementia.
Now, this research is still in its early stages, the rat is an imperfect model of the human just to make one point, but it's an interesting result non the less.
It's far to soon to cry "all's clear".
No it doesn't, it actually quotes a dept. of justice spokesman as saying that Ashcroft has nothing to do with the decision "because he has more important things to worry about." Big difference.
Now, wheter you choose to belive said spokesperson is another matter entirely. If it's really as people here say, that photographers have been bending over themselves to get the shot with conservative Ashcroft in the foreground and breast in the bakground (what is it with you americans and breasts anyway), I'd be very surprised if Ashcroft wasn't driving the change. To be a high ranking politician in one of the most cut-throat environments in the world, and not worry or care enough about your public image (or the perception of said, at best a distraction as someone else here said) to control a photo op such as this one, would be naive to say the least.
To think that someone like Ashcroft has gotten this far without managing his image carefully is naive as well.
Now, whether Ashcroft made this particular decision himself, or actually has people on staff to do it for him is less of an issue, he's still the man behind it, he has to be. That's not to say that it's unbelievable he did. Politicians usually look to image first (i.e. tend to it themselves), and the rest second (IMHO), so this is indeed an issue that I'd be surprised if it didn't get run by him.
Well, I used to be of that opinion too, then my first job was for a research laboratory, and it turned out that the school situation is a poor approximation for "real" work.
It turned out that the only mathematics I really had any use for was the one I had in my head. Why? Because hunkered down in the lab, discussing the setup or partial result of an experiment, you had to be able to think on your feet, to quickly come up with, and rule out, different hypotheses about what was going on, what effect we were seeing (as opposed to what effect we were trying to see).
Running off to my office and coming back 20 minutes later with the calculation in hand wouldn't have helped, the discussion would already have moved on.
That's not to say that there wasn't times when I sat alone on in my chambers with all the support you mention (computers, reference literature etc). But that was for the final write up of the results. By that time I already knew what the answer was going to be, since we had already done most of it in our collective heads as the experiment was running. That last write up was more a check to see that everything worked out than coming up with new angles. (And whenever a new angle came up that late in the game, it was either the subject of another experiment, or invalidated the one we had just performed).
I guestimate that I did no more than 10-20% of the calculations in my office, the rest was on the fly.
I would say that even stoping and taking the time to use a calculator during a meeting (impromptu or organised) is pushing your luck. If you cannot follow the discussion doing "back of the envelope" estimates in your head (depending on the field your in you might have to have a precision of from anywhere between 1-100%) you're out of the discussion.
Feynman has waxed on more eloquently than I on this very subject. Even though he's more hard core in this respect than I would like to be.
Now, in the rest of my career, as a CS/CE, I've solved exactly one first order integral since, so from that perspective you're right. References came in handy there, but that's not to say that I have a working knowledge of mathematics today.
This is somewhat ortoghonal to the question of whether we should teach children to learn using reference material and the like, I'm all with you there. Unfortunately, the way things stand, it should be drummed into most children, not to let school stand in the way of their education, but that's a different matter.
Not to mention no FTL-travel per se. You could jump to different parts of space through worm holes (compressors?), but with relativistic effects, you might end up meeting enemies from the 'future relatively speaking. Or from the 'past.'
Made for some 'interesting' engagements. (Or rather 'uninteresting' engagements, since the opponenents would'nt be matched.)
But speaking of zipping by, there was this one engagement where a smaller friendly ship feigned retreat, slingshotted around the compressor, came back with a huge velocity vector (effecting surprise), killed the alien ship, and then spent months retarding and turning back to pick up the survivors from the planet the battle was all about.
You mean they view the submitted sites? I'm confused.
No it doesn't. I quote "hlt - Halts CPU until RESET line is activated, NMI or maskable interrupt received. The CPU becomes dormant but retains the current CS:IP for later restart." That's why it's called the (surprise) halt-intruction.
The powersavings are substantial. A modern AMD ( e.g 2500+) has a current draw of 41.4 A in execution state, and only 7.2 A in stop grant state (powersaving 'hlt' with bus disconnect). Since power depends on current squared (it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's close enough for someone of your limited capacity), the powersavings are indeed substantial.
If you save only 80 W, over a year of 24/7 that adds up to about $40 where I live, which is again an order of magnitude more than you calculated.
And if you really believe that operating temperature doesn't have anything to do with life span, even when operating within the specified tolerances, you still have a bit of semiconductor physics to learn (hint 'kT' crops up again and again). Cooler is always better. (For cool enough the projected life span may be enough for one not to matter, but again if you think that running your AMD at the stated 80C continously is a good idea, well, what do I care, be my guest). Again this is a simplification, and again it's clearly good enough for you.
Now be a good boy and hit the books, you're welcome back when you actually know something.
Don't be confused, you're on a geek site remember? Just read up on the 'hlt' instruction on intel's website. There you'll learn that the unused cycles are in fact saved up; by lowering the energy consumption and hence temperature of the CPU. This lower temperature in turn adding up to a longer life of your processor.
The cheaper electricity bill is just an added bonus.