I think the posters here have read the press release (or at least the summary) exactly as Microsoft hoped they would. But there's a lot less threat to Linux in this than it may seem. The news is that Microsoft and Amdocs have signed a blanket cross-licensing agreement and Amdocs has paid some money. That's it.
Should Amdocs' cafeteria be using Microsoft-patented techniques in making their breakfast burritos, that's cool now -- It's covered in the agreement (even if it's not likely). And if Amdocs is using Microsoft-patented technology in the Linux-based servers in its data centers, that's cool too -- even if it's not likely. The fact that Microsoft takes pains to mention it in their press release is pure spin.
The blog provides the coordinates, 2915'34.29"N 09534'08.85"W, so you can view the formation on Google maps. If you check it out in map view, it still shows the original river bend with no cut-through.
Reading about this on Slashdot provides us with a clear source of inspiration in looking for ways to do this (marking) economically. Why not make marking of assignments, exams and papers a requirement for receiving your "degree"? The same could be done with tutoring, with senior students helping junior ones. This all scales very well, and reflects much of current practice at universities. The key difference is that the work is no longer paid, but goes towards earning your degree.
Meta-marking could also be built in to make the school mostly self-running (like Slashdot, or even better, Stackoverflow).
Gimp is an offensive term when used to refer to someone who is lame or handicapped. It may also evoke "the Gimp" from Pulp Fiction in some people's minds. However, it has other meanings, which are perfectly acceptable in polite conversation. Furthermore, it is a refreshingly straightforward, unforced, (indirectly) recursive acronym.
Personally, I am fine with the name and I picture the cute little whatever-it-is logo when I hear it, if I picture anything at all.
It's unlikely that a would-be assassin will learning the art of medical implant hacking in assassin school on the off chance that he'll one day have a target who just happens to have such an implant. As with today's black-hats, who focus on Windows over Linux (well, until the recent Mac headlines), their efforts will concentrate where they get the most leverage -- on cars. Even people who don't drive almost surely step into a car fairly regularly. The high-tech hacker-assassin may eschew the "old bomb under the chassis" bit, but why not a drive-by reprogramming of the ABS computer to disable the brakes when the car hits highway speed?
Can anybody make any sense of this passage from TFA?
Air is drawn in through vents in the nose of the turbine and a generator heats it producing steam. That steam is then fed through a cooling compressor to form moisture that gets condensed into water.
Produce steam by heating air? I thought you got steam buy heating water. And what the hell is a cooling compressor. Doesn't air heat as it is compressed?
OK, I got the sarcasm out of the way. But really, I'd like to know how this really works and the articles explanation strikes me a pretty garbled. What is accomplished by heating the air, only to cool it? Or is the air really heated as it is compressed, then gets cooled under compression (in the heat exchanger) so that when it goes though an expansion valve the cooling effect results in condensation of the humidity?
I'm sure this device works fine but the poor explanation by a "science journalist" leaves a lot to the imagination.
The yield must depend on moisture. Is this going to be useful in the Sahara or just outside of Las Vegas?
From TFA:
A prototype unit was constructed and erected in Abu Dhabi 6 months ago and has consistently produced up to 800 liters of water a day.
There's that "up to" again. This is marketing speak. I make a point of mentally translating it to "never, under any circumstances, more than", or "between 0 and". Anybody who intends to give helpful information gives an average and possibly standard deviation, including whatever conditions needed to attain those figures. If your only intent is to promote your tech, you say "up to".
On another note, this is not likely to be used to provide drinking water where seawater or ground water high in salts is available. You'd get more bang for your wind power with desalination. On the other hand it could be very useful for drip irrigation, where salts remaining in desalinated water and even relatively good ground water present long term problems for agriculture as they accumulate over time to concentrations that no crops can tollerate.
IANAL, but I do play Devil's Advocate on Slashdot from time to time. So forgive me, mods, if I criticise this criticism of ID. It should not be taken as a defense of the indefensible. But I just can let such sloppy logic go unchallenged.
Intelligent Design comes in two forms. The first is when we admit that it is just a euphemism for creationism. In this case, the theory of evolution (as well as most of the field of archaeology) clearly contradicts the story of Genesis, thus rendering the two incompatible.
There are many versions of creationism besides the Christian ones. You'll have to do better than that to prove incompatibility
This form of ID is basically the claim that evolutionary optimization can never escape local optima to discover global optima - something a competent applied mathematician knows to be false.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The ID propenents are on very solid ground in their belief that something as complex as an eye, a flagellum or the blood clotting cascade could not evolve given that the partially formed proto-systems are useless. That is abolutely the case. The problem with ID is that this uselessness is not a given. It's not that a random process can result in an escape from a local optimum (which is true to a limited extent, but not really relevant here). It's that a partial eye is not useless. Nor a partial flagellum.
Not sure parent deserves a +5. Monsanto does not, in fact, sell pesticide resistant corn seeds. And if it did, the corn would be herbicide resistant, not insecticide resistant. Plants, including corn, are already insecticide resistant -- they're insecticides, after all.
Monstanto is working on pest resistant corn -- specifically, corn resistant to corn root worm. So, if the bees were actually eating the corn or the corn pollen, that might be something to look at.
Interred indefinitely? I suppose after the first hour of so in the ground, you might as well be left there indefinitely. Or maybe you meant "interned"...
The summary accurately says the "same base area", i.e. footprint. This is not the panel area. The GP is underwhelmed with this announcement for good reason. This is not a breakthrough in efficiency in anything except the area required to erect the structure. It doesn't make better use of available light. It just captures more by reaching higher, making adjacent areas less valuable or even useless for further solar installations.
They suggest these towers and other configurations as useful for locations where available footprint is limited, such as urban areas. I dread the day when I start seeing such structures, erected by neighbours, looming over my fence and blocking out the sunlight to my patio, garden or my own solar collectors.
Pardon me mods, but +4 informative? This is a terrible summary from someone who doesn't seem to have understood what he's read.
The novel "cloudy-thing" aspect of the article's argument is the very part the parent misses when he dismisses this as "nothing new".
The cloud is an abstraction that intentionally hides detail. Cloud providers do that to make the service being offered simple to package, sell and use. They also do what they can to keep the tricks of their trade secret from competetors. But their infrastructure is actually very complex relative to what the average small to medium client would need for themselves. This is important in three ways:
1) Your own engineers can't take all aspects of a deployment into account when making decisions.
2) As a moderately sized company, using the cloud will expose you to the risks of emergent behaviour that would simply not be an issue on the smaller scale you would operate on if you ran your own infrastructure.
3) Your system may be humming along smoothly one moment, then start thrashing disasterously the next in the absence of any action on your part and for no apparent reason, simply because your cloud provider has tweaked some seemingly innocuous parameter (even after extensive testing)
This is an important and novel issue and worthy of some real consideration.
Even if your servers are dedicated, they are part of an infrastructure that you not only don't control, but don't know much about. How the network is run is probably actually very closely guarded competetive business information for your cloud provider.
The doctor, Oskar C. Aszmann, first performed a similar operation last year.
If the lady wants an artificial hand, that should be her call, but you have to wonder about her judgement if she wants a proctologist to do the procedure.
There are two (at least) perspectives you can take on fairness here:
The law-breaker's perspective - same infraction: same penalty.
The perspective of society as a whole - everyone in society is protected by the law to the extent necessary to give them fair treatment at the hands of their fellow citizens: more protection for those who need it more
You're taking the first perspective. Affirmative action, hate crime legislation and their ilk are a result of people who take the second perspective.
Richard Aborn, one of the bill's backers, said, 'We know from lots of studies and lots of data now that violent criminals very often begin their careers as nonviolent criminals. And the earlier you can get a nonviolent criminal's DNA in the data bank, the higher your chances are of apprehending the right person.'"
It's an undeniable fact that a comprensive DNA database of the citizenship would help police do their job. Obviously that's not the only consideration; if it were, why not give the cops unlimited power?
The powers we give the police, like the power we give to anybody, should be meted out carefully with an eye to balancing the pros and cons. We should be asking ourselves: why are we considering more power for police? Crime has been trending down for decades. If anything, striking a better balance now would mean revoking powers, not adding to them.
Look. The US and EU claim to believe in and promote democracy. There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
Excuse me, no. The democratic way is to give everyone a say, including those with little or no economic power. What YOU are advocating is a system where the people with money are deciding the outcome. That's a plutocracy. Very much like what you have in the US.
Yeah, well that's what their marketing stuff says, but that's just their end-run around the FDA. When used as directed: i.e. puffed into the mouth and swallowed, it can pass as a dietary supplement. But it's pretty clear that the fastest hit will come from inhaling and everybody knows it. The French manufacturer is named "Breathable Foods" for god's sake. Pretty transparent
Revenge can be sweet, but if your objective is deterrence, forget about the death penalty. There's plenty of evidence that it's ineffective. Understandably, most of that evidence looks specifically at homocide rates (not many countries impose the death penalty for wire fraud at the moment).
John Michael Greer's post on the end of the space age confirmed for me what I'd concluded myself: the stars are not for us. Nor the planets. Not even the moon. If you are a person of unwavering faith in the myth of infinite progress then you won't accept what he says. It may even seem ridiculous. Yet for those who've had nagging doubts, it can hit like a punch in the gut to finally hear it stated this firmly and this eloquently.
I was 8 years old when the Eagle landed on the moon. If there's ever a time to make a lasting impression on a boy, it's when he's 8. From that point on, humanity's expansion into space was a given: the bedrock of my vision of the future. In fact, it's hard to believe in infinite progress without taking space travel as a corollary. But I see the world declining now on so many fronts. The myth of progress seems not only false but absurd. Civilizations have their ups and downs. This last one has reached higher than any other, boosted by an enormous non-renewable energy supply, but that supply is now in decline and so are we, like all the others. We reached the moon at our apex, but did not grasp it, and now it is too late. Nobody's ever gonna stand on Mars. And I mean never.
I'm not exactly thrilled about the idea of Google narrowing my world view for me, but I suppose this is just an incremental step down a path we set out on long ago. Remember when "Site of the Day" was everybody's favorite spot on the web?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the posters here have read the press release (or at least the summary) exactly as Microsoft hoped they would. But there's a lot less threat to Linux in this than it may seem. The news is that Microsoft and Amdocs have signed a blanket cross-licensing agreement and Amdocs has paid some money. That's it.
Should Amdocs' cafeteria be using Microsoft-patented techniques in making their breakfast burritos, that's cool now -- It's covered in the agreement (even if it's not likely). And if Amdocs is using Microsoft-patented technology in the Linux-based servers in its data centers, that's cool too -- even if it's not likely. The fact that Microsoft takes pains to mention it in their press release is pure spin.
I.e. nothing to see here.
The blog provides the coordinates, 2915'34.29"N 09534'08.85"W, so you can view the formation on Google maps. If you check it out in map view, it still shows the original river bend with no cut-through.
Reading about this on Slashdot provides us with a clear source of inspiration in looking for ways to do this (marking) economically. Why not make marking of assignments, exams and papers a requirement for receiving your "degree"? The same could be done with tutoring, with senior students helping junior ones. This all scales very well, and reflects much of current practice at universities. The key difference is that the work is no longer paid, but goes towards earning your degree.
Meta-marking could also be built in to make the school mostly self-running (like Slashdot, or even better, Stackoverflow).
Gimp is an offensive term when used to refer to someone who is lame or handicapped. It may also evoke "the Gimp" from Pulp Fiction in some people's minds. However, it has other meanings, which are perfectly acceptable in polite conversation. Furthermore, it is a refreshingly straightforward, unforced, (indirectly) recursive acronym.
Personally, I am fine with the name and I picture the cute little whatever-it-is logo when I hear it, if I picture anything at all.
A talk by Rio's mayor, Eduardo Paes, was posted on TED today. Fast forward to 9:00 get a look at their command center.
It's unlikely that a would-be assassin will learning the art of medical implant hacking in assassin school on the off chance that he'll one day have a target who just happens to have such an implant. As with today's black-hats, who focus on Windows over Linux (well, until the recent Mac headlines), their efforts will concentrate where they get the most leverage -- on cars. Even people who don't drive almost surely step into a car fairly regularly. The high-tech hacker-assassin may eschew the "old bomb under the chassis" bit, but why not a drive-by reprogramming of the ABS computer to disable the brakes when the car hits highway speed?
Great TED talk on this topic here
Can anybody make any sense of this passage from TFA?
Air is drawn in through vents in the nose of the turbine and a generator heats it producing steam. That steam is then fed through a cooling compressor to form moisture that gets condensed into water.
Produce steam by heating air? I thought you got steam buy heating water. And what the hell is a cooling compressor. Doesn't air heat as it is compressed?
OK, I got the sarcasm out of the way. But really, I'd like to know how this really works and the articles explanation strikes me a pretty garbled. What is accomplished by heating the air, only to cool it? Or is the air really heated as it is compressed, then gets cooled under compression (in the heat exchanger) so that when it goes though an expansion valve the cooling effect results in condensation of the humidity?
I'm sure this device works fine but the poor explanation by a "science journalist" leaves a lot to the imagination.
The yield must depend on moisture. Is this going to be useful in the Sahara or just outside of Las Vegas?
From TFA:
A prototype unit was constructed and erected in Abu Dhabi 6 months ago and has consistently produced up to 800 liters of water a day.
There's that "up to" again. This is marketing speak. I make a point of mentally translating it to "never, under any circumstances, more than", or "between 0 and". Anybody who intends to give helpful information gives an average and possibly standard deviation, including whatever conditions needed to attain those figures. If your only intent is to promote your tech, you say "up to".
On another note, this is not likely to be used to provide drinking water where seawater or ground water high in salts is available. You'd get more bang for your wind power with desalination. On the other hand it could be very useful for drip irrigation, where salts remaining in desalinated water and even relatively good ground water present long term problems for agriculture as they accumulate over time to concentrations that no crops can tollerate.
IANAL, but I do play Devil's Advocate on Slashdot from time to time. So forgive me, mods, if I criticise this criticism of ID. It should not be taken as a defense of the indefensible. But I just can let such sloppy logic go unchallenged.
Intelligent Design comes in two forms. The first is when we admit that it is just a euphemism for creationism. In this case, the theory of evolution (as well as most of the field of archaeology) clearly contradicts the story of Genesis, thus rendering the two incompatible.
There are many versions of creationism besides the Christian ones. You'll have to do better than that to prove incompatibility
This form of ID is basically the claim that evolutionary optimization can never escape local optima to discover global optima - something a competent applied mathematician knows to be false.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The ID propenents are on very solid ground in their belief that something as complex as an eye, a flagellum or the blood clotting cascade could not evolve given that the partially formed proto-systems are useless. That is abolutely the case. The problem with ID is that this uselessness is not a given. It's not that a random process can result in an escape from a local optimum (which is true to a limited extent, but not really relevant here). It's that a partial eye is not useless. Nor a partial flagellum.
Not sure parent deserves a +5. Monsanto does not, in fact, sell pesticide resistant corn seeds. And if it did, the corn would be herbicide resistant, not insecticide resistant. Plants, including corn, are already insecticide resistant -- they're insecticides, after all.
Monstanto is working on pest resistant corn -- specifically, corn resistant to corn root worm. So, if the bees were actually eating the corn or the corn pollen, that might be something to look at.
Interred indefinitely? I suppose after the first hour of so in the ground, you might as well be left there indefinitely. Or maybe you meant "interned"...
The summary accurately says the "same base area", i.e. footprint. This is not the panel area. The GP is underwhelmed with this announcement for good reason. This is not a breakthrough in efficiency in anything except the area required to erect the structure. It doesn't make better use of available light. It just captures more by reaching higher, making adjacent areas less valuable or even useless for further solar installations.
They suggest these towers and other configurations as useful for locations where available footprint is limited, such as urban areas. I dread the day when I start seeing such structures, erected by neighbours, looming over my fence and blocking out the sunlight to my patio, garden or my own solar collectors.
Pardon me mods, but +4 informative? This is a terrible summary from someone who doesn't seem to have understood what he's read. The novel "cloudy-thing" aspect of the article's argument is the very part the parent misses when he dismisses this as "nothing new".
The cloud is an abstraction that intentionally hides detail. Cloud providers do that to make the service being offered simple to package, sell and use. They also do what they can to keep the tricks of their trade secret from competetors. But their infrastructure is actually very complex relative to what the average small to medium client would need for themselves. This is important in three ways:
This is an important and novel issue and worthy of some real consideration.
I'd be modding this up if I had points right now.
Even if your servers are dedicated, they are part of an infrastructure that you not only don't control, but don't know much about. How the network is run is probably actually very closely guarded competetive business information for your cloud provider.
The doctor, Oskar C. Aszmann, first performed a similar operation last year.
If the lady wants an artificial hand, that should be her call, but you have to wonder about her judgement if she wants a proctologist to do the procedure.
You're taking the first perspective. Affirmative action, hate crime legislation and their ilk are a result of people who take the second perspective.
So why are you siding with the law-breakers?
Richard Aborn, one of the bill's backers, said, 'We know from lots of studies and lots of data now that violent criminals very often begin their careers as nonviolent criminals. And the earlier you can get a nonviolent criminal's DNA in the data bank, the higher your chances are of apprehending the right person.'"
So when some senator discovers that youth who question authority are more likely to be delinquent, what then? Cotton swab for every child that talks back in class? Hair sample from any child that throws a tantrum at daycare.
It's an undeniable fact that a comprensive DNA database of the citizenship would help police do their job. Obviously that's not the only consideration; if it were, why not give the cops unlimited power?
The powers we give the police, like the power we give to anybody, should be meted out carefully with an eye to balancing the pros and cons. We should be asking ourselves: why are we considering more power for police? Crime has been trending down for decades. If anything, striking a better balance now would mean revoking powers, not adding to them.
Look. The US and EU claim to believe in and promote democracy. There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
Excuse me, no. The democratic way is to give everyone a say, including those with little or no economic power. What YOU are advocating is a system where the people with money are deciding the outcome. That's a plutocracy. Very much like what you have in the US.
Good catch. In fact, depending on how much more productive your 4 workers are at 40 hours per week, maybe you can even let one of them go.
Yeah, tell me you didn't rip that idea straight out of the pages of Lucifer's Hammer.
Yeah, well that's what their marketing stuff says, but that's just their end-run around the FDA. When used as directed: i.e. puffed into the mouth and swallowed, it can pass as a dietary supplement. But it's pretty clear that the fastest hit will come from inhaling and everybody knows it. The French manufacturer is named "Breathable Foods" for god's sake. Pretty transparent
For those of you who've never hung out with an engineer from the UK (and aren't one yourself), a valve in this context is a vacuum tube.
Revenge can be sweet, but if your objective is deterrence, forget about the death penalty. There's plenty of evidence that it's ineffective. Understandably, most of that evidence looks specifically at homocide rates (not many countries impose the death penalty for wire fraud at the moment).
John Michael Greer's post on the end of the space age confirmed for me what I'd concluded myself: the stars are not for us. Nor the planets. Not even the moon. If you are a person of unwavering faith in the myth of infinite progress then you won't accept what he says. It may even seem ridiculous. Yet for those who've had nagging doubts, it can hit like a punch in the gut to finally hear it stated this firmly and this eloquently.
I was 8 years old when the Eagle landed on the moon. If there's ever a time to make a lasting impression on a boy, it's when he's 8. From that point on, humanity's expansion into space was a given: the bedrock of my vision of the future. In fact, it's hard to believe in infinite progress without taking space travel as a corollary. But I see the world declining now on so many fronts. The myth of progress seems not only false but absurd. Civilizations have their ups and downs. This last one has reached higher than any other, boosted by an enormous non-renewable energy supply, but that supply is now in decline and so are we, like all the others. We reached the moon at our apex, but did not grasp it, and now it is too late. Nobody's ever gonna stand on Mars. And I mean never.
I'm not exactly thrilled about the idea of Google narrowing my world view for me, but I suppose this is just an incremental step down a path we set out on long ago. Remember when "Site of the Day" was everybody's favorite spot on the web?