You obviously don't work in academia. Now about your point that oil companies fund the anti-global warming research. The number I've heard on the money oil companies have contributed is in the tens of millions (this from an environmentalist group, I forget which). The actual global warming research being performed from grants in gov't agencies and whatnot? Billions. Now is it a surprise that the scientists on each side of the issue is proportionate to the amount of funding on each side? Let's just say I'm a little skeptical.
So do you work in academia? You write a well thought out and possibly pointed post, but you provide absolutely nothing to back up your thoughts - not even a "my personal experience" bit. As far as I can tell, there is no reason at all that I should believe anything in your post.
I see a huge amount of money being pumped into theoretical physics as well, that didn't make your list. What about cancer research? I would bet cancer research is outstripping AIDS research. Heart disease research? A lot more people die of that than of AIDS.
I postulate that you are full of it. My google search for "research grant" came up with grants for everything from nanotechnology to archeology - climate change and AIDS are in there, but I think you're totally misrepresenting the academia you claim to know..
I'm not so willing to pitch in and help out if I suspect that you're going to take the product of my hard labor, stick it in a proprietary application, and stuff the money you get for my labor in your bank account.
For almost every major project out there, someone somewhere is making money off of it. Would you stop contributing to the linux kernel because you know there are a bazillion vendors out there using that code to make money on their product?
I don't care what people use my code for. What I do care about is if that code is improved or fixed - I would like those changes. But if they don't want to contribute back, thats their choice. People who don't give back in that context don't get the full benefits, because they aren't working to improve the very code they're using.
The lines arent as clear as one might think - see my other post for an explanation.
You dont feel comfortable using _their_ code because it's GPL you mean.
Well, yes. But at what point does a piece of code become tainted in that regard? Lets say I have a function that I put out, and then someone else fixes a few little bugs - an improperly initialized variable here, a null pointer check there... How does that impact the licensing of that code? Is that code now co-owned? Do I have to remove their fixes if I want to use it? They fixed bugs, things that I may have found over time. How does that legally impact that code?
If someone else releases some code, then I spend a few days fixing bugs in it, do I have copyright on those fixes?
The line is not so clear as one would like to think. And I tend to err on the of caution when it comes to these things.
This is partly why I've tried to convert my projects to BSD licenses. I have a substantial amount of code that I've written GPL, and after working with people on these projects for several years, its hard to remember who wrote what. As a result, I don't use that codebase in any work that I do for my company that may be distributed.
I'm proud of the code I write, and a lot of it is portable - I know it inside and out - but other people have fixed, added on, improved and optimized my code. As a result of that happening under the GPL, I can't use that for other closed-source projects I work on. It's frustrating, I don't feel comfortable using my own code because its GPL'd.
Anything I work on in the last few years goes out BSD licensed, and I'm trying to convert my existing projects to BSD licenses as well. GPL has its place in core utilities, but I won't be GPL'ing my own code again for some time. BSD licensing is the way to go, imo.
There is a much easier way to approach this than expensive caching technologies: Internet Exchanges and Peering.
To those of you who aren't aware, peering points exist in just about every major city. They're generally nonprofit or extremely cheap. Some to gigs upon gigs of traffic. Torix for example, the Toronto exchange, moves over 4Gbit/s.
If the major players in the backbone industry stopped their aggressive peering agreements (Minimum 100 meg throughput, regardless of type?), and content providers like youtube started a more aggressive peering method, you would see the cost of this kind of transit drop.
The thing is that currently the content providers and the ISPs are playing -against- each other. The whole Net Neutrality lobby is an excellent example. If ISPs and content providers started to work together to get common traffic across low or zero cost links, then this problem would be a lot less common.
Akamai is doing a fairly good job of this currently, but I honestly can't think of any other major content providers that are. Major internet providers are often hard to peer with unless you are a huge presence as well.
Actually, it DOES come as a surprise to me. Maybe because I'm in Canada, but Dell's support has always been top notch for me.
Just two weeks ago, I called up and said my laptop was randomly rebooting a bluescreening, that I'd swapped the ram with no avail, and I wanted a new motherboard and ram. They had a technician come to my office the next day, and after an hour I got a laptop with a brand new motherboard and ram.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but that experience alone has convinced me that I won't be purchasing a laptop elsewhere.
Odd, my grandparents in rural northern ontario had a party line until a few years ago.
Each one had a different telephone number and they had their own distinct ring for each number, but it was the same copper pair in each of the four homes on the line.
I don't think they went out of service as long ago as you think.
In shop class, they had those emergency shutdown buttons to power off all the equipment in the room.
One day, I was doing some woodworking, using a flat-edge router, and I managed to slice off two fingertips on my left hand.
I proceeded to jump up and down, look at my missing fingertips, and I promptly hit the button. I did it to get attention though, not because there was any danger left.
The reference is to the following poem, taught in elementary school around remembrance day (November 11th) in Canada. Written by Canadian John McCrae, during the first world war. I recall it made a pretty decent impact on me - war is no picnic.
In Flander's Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flander's fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, tho poppies grow In Flander's fields.
It took me a solid 30 seconds of reading these two posts to understand why that was +5 funny. I'm Canadian, and that was a good proper use of an eh, unlike many of the jokes i see it in where its clumsily tacked onto a sentence where it makes no sense.
Also, there was a bug in the kernel in anything before 2.6.16 that resulted in any process blocked on an fcntl call over NFS to ignore any signals sent to it (including sigkill). I fought that one for months myself.
That might be their angle, but forget that. I'm very interested in seeing their source so I can use it for a starting point for my own ideas in MMOs. I just want to know more about their licensing. I have several ideas in that area, and look forward to some examples on how to actually handle the 3d mapping.
Haven't played second life though, so I dont know how applicable it will be to my ideas.
The single lacking feature stopping me from using it? Heck, even if it ties in with that other calendaring application from mozilla, at least recognizing outlook calendar requests and calling the other app.
What if someone gets some exploit code on one of these sites?
Why, F-secure can offer a service to make sure this doesn't happen! In fact, why not just say F-secure is responsible for validating sites in this TLD. That would be great.
The idea isn't really flawed, but the source is questionable. Its like a company that makes carbon filtering equipment says that all power plants should meet X carbon emissions. Great idea, not news, and blatantly self-serving.
I know nothing about this scandal, but one specific thing comes to mind when reading this:
What company has ever allowed the entire management team to go on vacation at the same time. I cant book vacation at the same time as a co-worker in my team. Nevermind managers trying to book vacations at the same time.
This answer wreaks of bullshit. Someone fucked up when someone else was on vacation. So they fucked up. Leave it at that and be done with.
You're rated funny, but you're totally right. You need people that can do that in order to make it all work, and then some high-powered birth control to make it safe. Sex isn't the problem, its jealousy and possession that cause problems.
The idea of an all-male crew, as was suggested by someone in relation to submarines currently, isn't really an option when you're trying to establish semi-permanent colonies. The only real alternative is to properly psychologically profile your candidates, and to keep an free-sex policy.
hiring proven generalists such as those produced by engineering schools (someone trained for a career) is something from a time past.
Funny thing, this is the phenomenon I've managed to build my entire career exploiting. The generalist is dead - and as a result, there is nobody that can look at the big picture anymore. I'm a systems architect - I know bits and pieces of everything. My entire job revolves around the fact that you can throw me at any problem whatsoever. I know datacenter management, network, hardware, operating system, package management, scripting and programming in various languages, version control, development lifecycles and project management. I do not specialize in any one of those areas, but every company I know has been deficient in at least one of them. That ends up making me the authority on that topic. I also have the ability to put together all the pieces into something cohesive.
I am -not- uncommon, but many people and companies discount the generalist, simply because we are players in all fields and masters of none.
But seriously, this is a terrible idea. Sure, they buy a nation for half a billion - now they have to defend it.
RIAA got the US government to pressure another government to arrest people with no case. How hard would it be to pressure the states to dispatch one small little ship to blow that little platform into the water? What would be the consequences?
When you own your own country, nobody comes to help you. "International law" is, after all, only a suggestion. Take a look at the US changed approach towards the Geneva conventions.
You're missing the point - the spam rate is BEFORE filtering, not after.
I got around 100 per day back a few years ago. When i started forwarding to gmail, I average a spam folder of 4000 (it deletes spam after 30 days).
In the past two months, its gone from between 5000 and 6000 to over 15,000. I would agree, hella higher than 35% though. At my place of employment, we have a million mailboxes. We started running into a lot more problems with spam than usual about 6 weeks ago as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. The supreme court now splits nicely down party lines for every vote.
I wonder how many 5-4 votes have gone through in the last six months, with votes falling the same way every time.
Americans: I feel sorry for you.
Dr. Timothy Ball, the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology, had his educational credentials challenged for question GW.
I love finding little things like this in these articles. Watch this report by the CBCs Fifth Estate.
A wonderful little piece of information from that documentary - around 28-34 minutes in, it talks about Dr. Tim Ball.
You obviously don't work in academia.
Now about your point that oil companies fund the anti-global warming research. The number I've heard on the money oil companies have contributed is in the tens of millions (this from an environmentalist group, I forget which). The actual global warming research being performed from grants in gov't agencies and whatnot? Billions. Now is it a surprise that the scientists on each side of the issue is proportionate to the amount of funding on each side? Let's just say I'm a little skeptical.
So do you work in academia? You write a well thought out and possibly pointed post, but you provide absolutely nothing to back up your thoughts - not even a "my personal experience" bit. As far as I can tell, there is no reason at all that I should believe anything in your post.
I see a huge amount of money being pumped into theoretical physics as well, that didn't make your list. What about cancer research? I would bet cancer research is outstripping AIDS research. Heart disease research? A lot more people die of that than of AIDS.
I postulate that you are full of it. My google search for "research grant" came up with grants for everything from nanotechnology to archeology - climate change and AIDS are in there, but I think you're totally misrepresenting the academia you claim to know..
I'm not so willing to pitch in and help out if I suspect that you're going to take the product of my hard labor, stick it in a proprietary application, and stuff the money you get for my labor in your bank account.
For almost every major project out there, someone somewhere is making money off of it. Would you stop contributing to the linux kernel because you know there are a bazillion vendors out there using that code to make money on their product?
I don't care what people use my code for. What I do care about is if that code is improved or fixed - I would like those changes. But if they don't want to contribute back, thats their choice. People who don't give back in that context don't get the full benefits, because they aren't working to improve the very code they're using.
The lines arent as clear as one might think - see my other post for an explanation.
You dont feel comfortable using _their_ code because it's GPL you mean.
Well, yes. But at what point does a piece of code become tainted in that regard? Lets say I have a function that I put out, and then someone else fixes a few little bugs - an improperly initialized variable here, a null pointer check there... How does that impact the licensing of that code? Is that code now co-owned? Do I have to remove their fixes if I want to use it? They fixed bugs, things that I may have found over time. How does that legally impact that code?
If someone else releases some code, then I spend a few days fixing bugs in it, do I have copyright on those fixes?
The line is not so clear as one would like to think. And I tend to err on the of caution when it comes to these things.
This is partly why I've tried to convert my projects to BSD licenses. I have a substantial amount of code that I've written GPL, and after working with people on these projects for several years, its hard to remember who wrote what. As a result, I don't use that codebase in any work that I do for my company that may be distributed.
I'm proud of the code I write, and a lot of it is portable - I know it inside and out - but other people have fixed, added on, improved and optimized my code. As a result of that happening under the GPL, I can't use that for other closed-source projects I work on. It's frustrating, I don't feel comfortable using my own code because its GPL'd.
Anything I work on in the last few years goes out BSD licensed, and I'm trying to convert my existing projects to BSD licenses as well. GPL has its place in core utilities, but I won't be GPL'ing my own code again for some time. BSD licensing is the way to go, imo.
There is a much easier way to approach this than expensive caching technologies: Internet Exchanges and Peering.
To those of you who aren't aware, peering points exist in just about every major city. They're generally nonprofit or extremely cheap. Some to gigs upon gigs of traffic. Torix for example, the Toronto exchange, moves over 4Gbit/s.
If the major players in the backbone industry stopped their aggressive peering agreements (Minimum 100 meg throughput, regardless of type?), and content providers like youtube started a more aggressive peering method, you would see the cost of this kind of transit drop.
The thing is that currently the content providers and the ISPs are playing -against- each other. The whole Net Neutrality lobby is an excellent example. If ISPs and content providers started to work together to get common traffic across low or zero cost links, then this problem would be a lot less common.
Akamai is doing a fairly good job of this currently, but I honestly can't think of any other major content providers that are. Major internet providers are often hard to peer with unless you are a huge presence as well.
Actually, it DOES come as a surprise to me. Maybe because I'm in Canada, but Dell's support has always been top notch for me.
Just two weeks ago, I called up and said my laptop was randomly rebooting a bluescreening, that I'd swapped the ram with no avail, and I wanted a new motherboard and ram. They had a technician come to my office the next day, and after an hour I got a laptop with a brand new motherboard and ram.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but that experience alone has convinced me that I won't be purchasing a laptop elsewhere.
Odd, my grandparents in rural northern ontario had a party line until a few years ago.
Each one had a different telephone number and they had their own distinct ring for each number, but it was the same copper pair in each of the four homes on the line.
I don't think they went out of service as long ago as you think.
I did something different as a kid.
In shop class, they had those emergency shutdown buttons to power off all the equipment in the room.
One day, I was doing some woodworking, using a flat-edge router, and I managed to slice off two fingertips on my left hand.
I proceeded to jump up and down, look at my missing fingertips, and I promptly hit the button. I did it to get attention though, not because there was any danger left.
The reference is to the following poem, taught in elementary school around remembrance day (November 11th) in Canada. Written by Canadian John McCrae, during the first world war. I recall it made a pretty decent impact on me - war is no picnic.
In Flander's Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flander's fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, tho poppies grow
In Flander's fields.
Liet. -Col. John McCrae
It took me a solid 30 seconds of reading these two posts to understand why that was +5 funny. I'm Canadian, and that was a good proper use of an eh, unlike many of the jokes i see it in where its clumsily tacked onto a sentence where it makes no sense.
Also, there was a bug in the kernel in anything before 2.6.16 that resulted in any process blocked on an fcntl call over NFS to ignore any signals sent to it (including sigkill). I fought that one for months myself.
That might be their angle, but forget that. I'm very interested in seeing their source so I can use it for a starting point for my own ideas in MMOs. I just want to know more about their licensing. I have several ideas in that area, and look forward to some examples on how to actually handle the 3d mapping.
Haven't played second life though, so I dont know how applicable it will be to my ideas.
Thanks SL!
The single lacking feature stopping me from using it? Heck, even if it ties in with that other calendaring application from mozilla, at least recognizing outlook calendar requests and calling the other app.
Even bad html in article summaries gets to the main page. I'm not sure how you managed to miss that Taco.
What if someone gets some exploit code on one of these sites?
Why, F-secure can offer a service to make sure this doesn't happen! In fact, why not just say F-secure is responsible for validating sites in this TLD. That would be great.
The idea isn't really flawed, but the source is questionable. Its like a company that makes carbon filtering equipment says that all power plants should meet X carbon emissions. Great idea, not news, and blatantly self-serving.
I think thats exactly what it is.
If Mars were topographically flat, the amount of water in this reserve would cover the planet at a depth of 10 meters.
It doesn't take into account that most of that water would sit in the lowest lying areas.
I know nothing about this scandal, but one specific thing comes to mind when reading this:
What company has ever allowed the entire management team to go on vacation at the same time. I cant book vacation at the same time as a co-worker in my team. Nevermind managers trying to book vacations at the same time.
This answer wreaks of bullshit. Someone fucked up when someone else was on vacation. So they fucked up. Leave it at that and be done with.
Yes, exactly. Ignorance is bliss. What we need around here is a whole lot more ignorance.
ps, im being sarcastic
You're rated funny, but you're totally right. You need people that can do that in order to make it all work, and then some high-powered birth control to make it safe. Sex isn't the problem, its jealousy and possession that cause problems.
The idea of an all-male crew, as was suggested by someone in relation to submarines currently, isn't really an option when you're trying to establish semi-permanent colonies. The only real alternative is to properly psychologically profile your candidates, and to keep an free-sex policy.
hiring proven generalists such as those produced by engineering schools (someone trained for a career) is something from a time past.
Funny thing, this is the phenomenon I've managed to build my entire career exploiting. The generalist is dead - and as a result, there is nobody that can look at the big picture anymore. I'm a systems architect - I know bits and pieces of everything. My entire job revolves around the fact that you can throw me at any problem whatsoever. I know datacenter management, network, hardware, operating system, package management, scripting and programming in various languages, version control, development lifecycles and project management. I do not specialize in any one of those areas, but every company I know has been deficient in at least one of them. That ends up making me the authority on that topic. I also have the ability to put together all the pieces into something cohesive.
I am -not- uncommon, but many people and companies discount the generalist, simply because we are players in all fields and masters of none.
How true.
But seriously, this is a terrible idea. Sure, they buy a nation for half a billion - now they have to defend it.
RIAA got the US government to pressure another government to arrest people with no case. How hard would it be to pressure the states to dispatch one small little ship to blow that little platform into the water? What would be the consequences?
When you own your own country, nobody comes to help you. "International law" is, after all, only a suggestion. Take a look at the US changed approach towards the Geneva conventions.
The Russian officials said that the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen.
Does. Not. Parse.
You're missing the point - the spam rate is BEFORE filtering, not after.
I got around 100 per day back a few years ago. When i started forwarding to gmail, I average a spam folder of 4000 (it deletes spam after 30 days).
In the past two months, its gone from between 5000 and 6000 to over 15,000. I would agree, hella higher than 35% though. At my place of employment, we have a million mailboxes. We started running into a lot more problems with spam than usual about 6 weeks ago as well.