No, it's not based on area. No, it's not based on population. It's based on local population density. The average density of the whole country isn't relevant, it's the distances between clusters and individual houses that matters, and you cannot accurately boil that down to a single representative number.
No, it's a social problem. Technology can't solve it.
As long as you have careless users, no attempt to fix the problem with technology will work. The perfect example is that debunking of Bank of America's "sitekey" bullshit. "60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns."
Seconded. My windows box at home is often up for more than 40 days at a time with zero problems.
In fact, a program I use that (in addition to other functions) monitors uptime seems to crash due to a numerical overflow that I suspect is related to measuring uptime.
In unusual contrast, the ubuntu box I use at work frequently does inexplicable things for no apparent reason. My notification area randomly screwed itself up a few days ago, and I'm unable to restore it, one time my desktop background randomly disappeared after a reboot. Attempting to add a main menu item that launches SQL Developer is a usability nightmare (it's a seven step process to re-edit a menu item you're trying to get working). And then it quietly fails to work but leaves massively CPU intensive bash processes running quietly in the background. I wasn't even aware it was creating processes until I noticed my computer was heinously unresponsive due to CPU load.
And then seemingly at random 8-10 times a day some sort of load spike hits, my mouse stutters, and if I'm typing at the time its as if I held down the key for 3 seconds, screwing up whatever I was typing at the time. I have no idea how to track this down, nor why some rogue process is allowed to take priority over user input devices despite having reniced my mouse to -10.
I acknowledge that this is anecdotal evidence, and probably largely as a result of a decade of windows experience and relatively limited experience, but I'm a fairly advanced user and have way more problems with linux than windows.
But, in the end, they're playing in the same fantasy-genre sandbox and they just cannot compete with WoW.
I played wow early on got the collector's edition, and everything. Eventually got very bored and quit. I mostly like PvP, but if you do pure pvp in wow, you don't level. I got tired of the grind and quit. In Warhammer you can level all the way to 40 without killing a single NPC monster. You even get great gear from it.
That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.
This is very misleading. Sure 11.5 million players is an incredible amount, but they play on how many different servers? 400? This means there are probably at most 30k players a server. It equates roughly to at most 4,800 or so players on at any given time. Compare this to the only truly massive MOG I'm familiar with, EVE online. It has usually has 25-35k players active on one server at the same time. Sure WoW is bigger in terms of player base, but the actual number of players participating in any given thing is minuscule by comparison. EVE routinely has 300 to a thousand players in a single battle. There's only one server too. This means you and all your friends can't help but play on the same server. This perk is unique in the MMO world as far as I can tell. It's also a completely different genre (Space/Scifi) with heinous death penalties. But those penalties result in the creation of a phenomenon I've never heard of outside of EVE called the "pvp shakes". It often get so intense people's body shake. You'll hear them talk about it in vent, or in local chat, or on forums and evemails. The battles are often fewer and sometimes shorter, but they are orders of magnitude more intense and stimulating as a result.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on Blizzard, I'm just not into WoW. I prefer other MMOs, notably EVE and Warhammer.
What is the benefit of writing a BIOS in C over assembly code?
Maintainability. Further, it's fairly common knowledge that C compilers these days can often produce code that is more efficient than hand written assembly, so it's a no-brainer to write C instead.
Funny thing is I'm using a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 to type this and a Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 on a laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.
Recognition of this fact is why I voted to raise my own taxes to keep the road my house is on in good condition.
Could you imagine having to hike, backpack, or ride a horse to the grocery store? Goodbye frozen dinners, ice cream, fresh milk, eggs, fresh meat, cheese, and cold beer.
Roads are bleedin' important, people.
It's much the same with the 'ole tubes.
Without them, I can't play games with friends, talk to friends, learn of a hurricane heading my way, share pictures and news with friends and family, learn of mass murders loose in my area, learn where the grey headed parkaeet came from (random article), find out where convicted sex offenders live, get directions to places no one I know has ever been, get recall information, pay my taxes, order presents, and last, but of course not least, look at pr0n.
In short, matter is mostly empty space, especially on that scale.
The odds of a tiny black hole getting close enough to regular matter to do anything are comparable to the odds of hitting a.50 caliber bullet fired at random in a field in Kansas with a.22 pistol fired from the moon.
It makes winning the lottery sound unavoidable by comparison.
I would contend that all articles should link to the print preview if the article has obnoxious ads or superfluous page breaks, but then they'd just stop providing print views.
I think what he means is he doesn't want to plunk down a wad of cash for an OS, then be forced to keep paying a monthly fee or his OS stops working.
It's a preference for an ownership model vs. a subscription model and I agree with him. I'm aware that Windows today is licensed as I'm sure he was, but it's a license with a fee that you pay once. The same with Office. What MS probably dreams of is moving to a subscription model where users have no choice but to pay monthly for continued use of their OS.
The numbers were made up because they were largely irrelevant, it was the model he saw them wanting that he objected to, not the particular made up fees.
There's no "should" to it. People are always going to try and get as much as they can for as little as they can. The opposing force is that businesses are trying to get as much money as possible for as little expense as possible. And given the internet, people are going to find ways to get free, or nearly free digital content. They're going to take pay to play content and distribute it in free fashions. They're going to take advertisement laden content and strip out the ads. These are both inevitable.
What content businesses need to do is find a way, given these two facts to continually produce new content that people will pay for. Basically, continual high quality is the easiest, cheapest, and best way to do this. Take Techdirt for example. They deliberately syndicate their articles are syndicated on their RSS feed because they know if they're good, people will visit the site anyway. Whereas foolhardy businesses like members of the *AA try to maintain a monopoly on an intangible easily copied product. An exercise in futility.
Funny, to do my job I was required to log into 20 different systems. Two of which were windows. Only one of those windows machines was DoD property. That leaves 18 machines running a handful of Unices and a VMS based systems. Windows was definitely the odd man out.
1) next to impossible != impossible 2) if the feds require multi-pass wipes for non-classified data and media destruction for classified data, why should I settle for anything less?
Because the government is rife with paranoid, bureaucratic nitwits with more motivation to be "safe" than is scientifically prudent, and far more motivation to further their own careers?
And I add bureaucratic for very pointed reasons. In the beginning, suppose they had a competent CS guy deciding the policies for HD erasure, he probably figures a single zeroing is sufficient. And at the time (perhaps now too) he's correct. Then his successor wants to make in impression and put some bullet points on his resume, so he makes a big stink about "increasing security through a continuing commitment to data erasure" or some buzzword nonsense. Let's say this guy was a friend or relative of the previous guy - and not necessarily as competent. Now this did fuck all for actually making the data any harder to get at, but it furthered his career just a tiny bit. Now add 3-4 repetitions of this to the mix and you can see how the policies got to be so ridiculous. Now I am making all this up, but to me, this seems far more plausible than recovering overwritten data on a hard drive. How many times have you had trouble with your drive accidentally reading previous data from it? You know, with a drive head that was designed, redesigned, and improved over 50 years to read data from that disk.
I don't get why people often think that the US government has super awesome technology that borders on magic in the field of computer science. In my experience they were 30+ years behind the times in some areas. Some better, some worse.
The government is just made up of people. Like everyone else, so there's lots of human error. And since they get paid through taxes and don't have to worry about profits, they have little to no motivation to do a good job if their superior doesn't make them. It's why the government is into contracting these days, they get the job done quicker and better for less money because (in most cases) they have competition.
One million for 7 songs?! How does something like that even get in to court? Can you imagine if I stole $6.93 (.99 x 7) worth of beef jerky from 7-11? Do you think the court would even hear a case where they wanted a million for my crime?
Except it's not even that bad!
It's more like your friend bought a magazine from 7-11, and took it home, scanned it into his computer and sent you the pictures. 7-11 was never actually deprived of any assets.
Care to do a sum it up for me with a total "buy in" cost for a decent plane (not a $500 car equivalent), GPS, new emergency beacon, pilot's license and a "yearly cost" including maintenance, a rough guess at fuel, and any license renewal shenanigans?
I could pour over your post and do it, but I don't understand this stuff that well and would probably fuck it up. Also, you didn't list the cost a "decent" plane.
News flash for you: The Civil War was not all about slavery.
And technically, what most think is the "Rebel flag" is the battle flag, not the official flag.*
*Told to me 2nd hand by a guy that created websites for a dude who did "Civil War photography" in PA. The guy makes his living off of being a Civil War buff, but could still be wrong.
An entry on the Hindenburg does not need a video of the Hindenburg disaster.
I disagree. I think that's a perfect example of an article that needs video. In my mind the video starts when something goes visibly wrong to the point that it's a pile of stationary, yet flaming wreckage on the ground and that's it.
Contrast this with typical American TV that is so fucking full of filler like commentary and "dramatic" camera movements that I can't watch it anymore. Like "World's Most Dangerous Police Chases" and the like. There's like 3 minutes of worthy video padded with 3-10 repetitions and 21 minutes of inane blathering no one cares about. The kind of stuff that is invariably absent on youtube renditions - even those taken from the show.
I think there are exceptional cases where a video is warranted, but they should be extremely short. No commentary whatsoever. Text is a better format for it.
This turned out to be a kind of exploratory essay, and I apologize, but I guess the conclusion is: Yes wikipedia should have video, but only in exceptional cases, and keep it as short as possible, and no speaking.
Lastly, I expect Wikipedia's video posting rules to cite this post.*
*Warning: do not attempt to read this sentence without a sense of humor.
I'm certain they could if it were really made a priority.
You'd have to give up detecting devices and assume they were there unless put into a special "detect devices" boot mode (such as holding down a key).
And you'd have to have all the data the OS needs to start up sitting somewhere faster than a HD, or sitting in a very very organized way on a really fast HD.
And you'd probably have to completely replace the normal BIOS stage.
A good place to look would be digital cameras. Booting quickly has almost always been a very high priority for them, and these days they're more sophisticated than old computers. Mine does it approximately 1 second.
But personally, I want a machine that's so stable I don't have to reboot often enough to care how long it takes to boot.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm Anonymous Coward.
No, it's not based on area. No, it's not based on population. It's based on local population density. The average density of the whole country isn't relevant, it's the distances between clusters and individual houses that matters, and you cannot accurately boil that down to a single representative number.
No, it's a social problem. Technology can't solve it.
As long as you have careless users, no attempt to fix the problem with technology will work. The perfect example is that debunking of Bank of America's "sitekey" bullshit. "60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns."
Seconded. My windows box at home is often up for more than 40 days at a time with zero problems.
In fact, a program I use that (in addition to other functions) monitors uptime seems to crash due to a numerical overflow that I suspect is related to measuring uptime.
In unusual contrast, the ubuntu box I use at work frequently does inexplicable things for no apparent reason. My notification area randomly screwed itself up a few days ago, and I'm unable to restore it, one time my desktop background randomly disappeared after a reboot. Attempting to add a main menu item that launches SQL Developer is a usability nightmare (it's a seven step process to re-edit a menu item you're trying to get working). And then it quietly fails to work but leaves massively CPU intensive bash processes running quietly in the background. I wasn't even aware it was creating processes until I noticed my computer was heinously unresponsive due to CPU load.
And then seemingly at random 8-10 times a day some sort of load spike hits, my mouse stutters, and if I'm typing at the time its as if I held down the key for 3 seconds, screwing up whatever I was typing at the time. I have no idea how to track this down, nor why some rogue process is allowed to take priority over user input devices despite having reniced my mouse to -10.
I acknowledge that this is anecdotal evidence, and probably largely as a result of a decade of windows experience and relatively limited experience, but I'm a fairly advanced user and have way more problems with linux than windows.
A few points at random...
I played wow early on got the collector's edition, and everything. Eventually got very bored and quit. I mostly like PvP, but if you do pure pvp in wow, you don't level. I got tired of the grind and quit. In Warhammer you can level all the way to 40 without killing a single NPC monster. You even get great gear from it.
This is very misleading. Sure 11.5 million players is an incredible amount, but they play on how many different servers? 400? This means there are probably at most 30k players a server. It equates roughly to at most 4,800 or so players on at any given time. Compare this to the only truly massive MOG I'm familiar with, EVE online. It has usually has 25-35k players active on one server at the same time. Sure WoW is bigger in terms of player base, but the actual number of players participating in any given thing is minuscule by comparison. EVE routinely has 300 to a thousand players in a single battle. There's only one server too. This means you and all your friends can't help but play on the same server. This perk is unique in the MMO world as far as I can tell. It's also a completely different genre (Space/Scifi) with heinous death penalties. But those penalties result in the creation of a phenomenon I've never heard of outside of EVE called the "pvp shakes". It often get so intense people's body shake. You'll hear them talk about it in vent, or in local chat, or on forums and evemails. The battles are often fewer and sometimes shorter, but they are orders of magnitude more intense and stimulating as a result.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on Blizzard, I'm just not into WoW. I prefer other MMOs, notably EVE and Warhammer.
The first commercial cloning happened back in August. And if you thought cloning a dog was odd, wait till you read about the crazy mormon-stalker-rapist-criminal-conspirator-minor-delinquency-contributor lady whose dog it was.
The source is here but dlisted really boils it down to the interesting bits for you if you do not mind the profanity.
Maintainability. Further, it's fairly common knowledge that C compilers these days can often produce code that is more efficient than hand written assembly, so it's a no-brainer to write C instead.
I think you missed the point. The problem is an operating system vendor is bundling their web browser with their operating system.
Actually they're quite good at making HCI hardware (sometimes).
I love the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. Prior to that, I loved the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro. Sometimes they're terrible at it though. Other bizarre screw ups include mice that have notchless wheels. I cannot figure out how that's in any way a good thing, yet half of their mice lack them.
Funny thing is I'm using a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 to type this and a Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3000 on a laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.
The DMCA got them around that little problem.
Recognition of this fact is why I voted to raise my own taxes to keep the road my house is on in good condition.
Could you imagine having to hike, backpack, or ride a horse to the grocery store? Goodbye frozen dinners, ice cream, fresh milk, eggs, fresh meat, cheese, and cold beer.
Roads are bleedin' important, people.
It's much the same with the 'ole tubes.
Without them, I can't play games with friends, talk to friends, learn of a hurricane heading my way, share pictures and news with friends and family, learn of mass murders loose in my area, learn where the grey headed parkaeet came from (random article), find out where convicted sex offenders live, get directions to places no one I know has ever been, get recall information, pay my taxes, order presents, and last, but of course not least, look at pr0n.
The intertubes are bleedin' important people.
In short, matter is mostly empty space, especially on that scale.
The odds of a tiny black hole getting close enough to regular matter to do anything are comparable to the odds of hitting a .50 caliber bullet fired at random in a field in Kansas with a .22 pistol fired from the moon.
It makes winning the lottery sound unavoidable by comparison.
Print view
I would contend that all articles should link to the print preview if the article has obnoxious ads or superfluous page breaks, but then they'd just stop providing print views.
Keep this to yourselves. ;)
I think what he means is he doesn't want to plunk down a wad of cash for an OS, then be forced to keep paying a monthly fee or his OS stops working.
It's a preference for an ownership model vs. a subscription model and I agree with him. I'm aware that Windows today is licensed as I'm sure he was, but it's a license with a fee that you pay once. The same with Office. What MS probably dreams of is moving to a subscription model where users have no choice but to pay monthly for continued use of their OS.
The numbers were made up because they were largely irrelevant, it was the model he saw them wanting that he objected to, not the particular made up fees.
There's no "should" to it. People are always going to try and get as much as they can for as little as they can. The opposing force is that businesses are trying to get as much money as possible for as little expense as possible. And given the internet, people are going to find ways to get free, or nearly free digital content. They're going to take pay to play content and distribute it in free fashions. They're going to take advertisement laden content and strip out the ads. These are both inevitable.
What content businesses need to do is find a way, given these two facts to continually produce new content that people will pay for. Basically, continual high quality is the easiest, cheapest, and best way to do this. Take Techdirt for example. They deliberately syndicate their articles are syndicated on their RSS feed because they know if they're good, people will visit the site anyway. Whereas foolhardy businesses like members of the *AA try to maintain a monopoly on an intangible easily copied product. An exercise in futility.
Navy.
Was...not there anymore.
Funny, to do my job I was required to log into 20 different systems. Two of which were windows. Only one of those windows machines was DoD property. That leaves 18 machines running a handful of Unices and a VMS based systems. Windows was definitely the odd man out.
Because the government is rife with paranoid, bureaucratic nitwits with more motivation to be "safe" than is scientifically prudent, and far more motivation to further their own careers?
And I add bureaucratic for very pointed reasons. In the beginning, suppose they had a competent CS guy deciding the policies for HD erasure, he probably figures a single zeroing is sufficient. And at the time (perhaps now too) he's correct. Then his successor wants to make in impression and put some bullet points on his resume, so he makes a big stink about "increasing security through a continuing commitment to data erasure" or some buzzword nonsense. Let's say this guy was a friend or relative of the previous guy - and not necessarily as competent. Now this did fuck all for actually making the data any harder to get at, but it furthered his career just a tiny bit. Now add 3-4 repetitions of this to the mix and you can see how the policies got to be so ridiculous. Now I am making all this up, but to me, this seems far more plausible than recovering overwritten data on a hard drive. How many times have you had trouble with your drive accidentally reading previous data from it? You know, with a drive head that was designed, redesigned, and improved over 50 years to read data from that disk.
I don't get why people often think that the US government has super awesome technology that borders on magic in the field of computer science. In my experience they were 30+ years behind the times in some areas. Some better, some worse.
The government is just made up of people. Like everyone else, so there's lots of human error. And since they get paid through taxes and don't have to worry about profits, they have little to no motivation to do a good job if their superior doesn't make them. It's why the government is into contracting these days, they get the job done quicker and better for less money because (in most cases) they have competition.
Except it's not even that bad!
It's more like your friend bought a magazine from 7-11, and took it home, scanned it into his computer and sent you the pictures. 7-11 was never actually deprived of any assets.
You listed a ton of hidden costs.
Care to do a sum it up for me with a total "buy in" cost for a decent plane (not a $500 car equivalent), GPS, new emergency beacon, pilot's license and a "yearly cost" including maintenance, a rough guess at fuel, and any license renewal shenanigans?
I could pour over your post and do it, but I don't understand this stuff that well and would probably fuck it up. Also, you didn't list the cost a "decent" plane.
News flash for you: The Civil War was not all about slavery.
And technically, what most think is the "Rebel flag" is the battle flag, not the official flag.*
*Told to me 2nd hand by a guy that created websites for a dude who did "Civil War photography" in PA. The guy makes his living off of being a Civil War buff, but could still be wrong.
Is anyone else sick of getting the links 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th hand?
Here's the direct one for those interested.
In my book that's cool, but what I'm afraid of idiotic commentary. Besides, it could be transcripted, and the emotional stress described.
I disagree. I think that's a perfect example of an article that needs video. In my mind the video starts when something goes visibly wrong to the point that it's a pile of stationary, yet flaming wreckage on the ground and that's it.
Contrast this with typical American TV that is so fucking full of filler like commentary and "dramatic" camera movements that I can't watch it anymore. Like "World's Most Dangerous Police Chases" and the like. There's like 3 minutes of worthy video padded with 3-10 repetitions and 21 minutes of inane blathering no one cares about. The kind of stuff that is invariably absent on youtube renditions - even those taken from the show.
I think there are exceptional cases where a video is warranted, but they should be extremely short. No commentary whatsoever. Text is a better format for it.
This turned out to be a kind of exploratory essay, and I apologize, but I guess the conclusion is: Yes wikipedia should have video, but only in exceptional cases, and keep it as short as possible, and no speaking.
Lastly, I expect Wikipedia's video posting rules to cite this post.*
*Warning: do not attempt to read this sentence without a sense of humor.
I'm certain they could if it were really made a priority.
You'd have to give up detecting devices and assume they were there unless put into a special "detect devices" boot mode (such as holding down a key).
And you'd have to have all the data the OS needs to start up sitting somewhere faster than a HD, or sitting in a very very organized way on a really fast HD.
And you'd probably have to completely replace the normal BIOS stage.
A good place to look would be digital cameras. Booting quickly has almost always been a very high priority for them, and these days they're more sophisticated than old computers. Mine does it approximately 1 second.
But personally, I want a machine that's so stable I don't have to reboot often enough to care how long it takes to boot.