By saying "or so" I'm assuming that 0 is included in this estimate? Seriously, do you have any reference at all for this number? How the hell was this modded interesting?
Mod parent up. If you're going to commit a felony that will result in significant jail time, at least rob a bank or a high end jewelery store. Instead they steal an easily tracked, serial-numbered product with a ridiculously low fence-to-retail value. Furthermore, their crime is newsworthy enough ("Look at those shiny macbooks disappear!") that they manage to get coverage on major websites and news outlets.
Finally, they incur the wrath of apple fanboys everywhere now determined to track them down: "Did you see how they handled those MacBooks! They might even have scratched the case!!!"
They're pretty much unrelated. Savana doesn't aim to provide all of the functionality of git. What it DOES do is make it really easy to work "the right way" with SVN, with "the right way" defined as:
1. Every time I'm going to code a new feature/bug fix, I do it in a private branch. 2. I checkin normally on this branch. 3. When I'm ready to promote my changes, I first sync down any more recent changes from the trunk. 4. Optionally, I can have someone else look at my branch to do a code read. 5. I promote (merge my changes back to trunk) and drop my private branch.
It's currently possible to work like this now with subversion, but it's pretty ugly and a pain requiring long commands, and developers generally don't like it because it is such a pain to set up the private branches and merge them, so they end up just doing everything in trunk. Savana is essentially just syntactic sugar on top of (potentially multiple) underlying uglier svn commands. Savana aims to make it easy to set up and merge private branches, lowering developer resistance to using them.
Friends of mine have open-sourced savana, http://savana.codehaus.org/ a thin layer on top of Subversion that makes it easy to do all work in private branches before promoting to the trunk. A common workflow is:
sav createuserbranch mybranch --calls svn copy under the covers to create user branch named mybranch... normal checkins using svn commit go to YOUR private branch... when you are ready to promote your changes back to the trunk: sav sync -- pulls in any changes made to trunk since your private branch was created so you can test locally sav promote -- merges your changes back into the trunk
The thing I like about this thin "workspace managing" layer on top of Subversion is that for the most part you can take advantage of existing tool support for subversion (like integrated IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse support), as all of the savana commands just call svn commands under the covers.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I found the details of the article very interesting. Of 299 US government loans to Micronesians, over 200 were not paid up!! That makes subprime loans look like gold. Basically, the Micronesians are treating these as gifts, not loans. And why not - it's obvious the lender (that would be you, the American taxpayer) doesn't have any real recourse to collect. It's not like the Micronesians have anything to fear from US credit bureaus, who can't even track them adequately.
In other words, the US government tries to pretend these are loans by putting SSNs on the accounts, which ends up screwing over some hapless US citizen, when they should just treat them as gifts, because in reality it looks like they are.
Ugg, how is it that the parent is modded down but the GP is modded insightful? The GP is basically just saying "well, that doesn't feel like enough to me", while the parent points out accurately that it very easy to determine what the probability is that the results are due to chance. Since the article states that the researchers obtained "significantly" more cigarettes, I'm assuming that this is at least based on the common level of 5%. You can have a small sample size that is highly statistically significant if the skew is large enough. Unfortunately, even on slashdot, most people don't understand statistics.
That said, hypothesis testing just determines the probability that the results are NOT due to chance. Thus, it's totally possible that the results are due to something different that what the researchers propose - maybe they were just friendlier when asking from the right side.
Actually, the big news to me that seems to be somewhat lost on the slashdot crowd is how Apple is really gunning for the business market that RIM has previously owned. Remote wipe, hardware encryption, and Exchange support in Snow Leopard are HUGE for businesses. I think that lots of businesses (or at least many of the employees of those businesses) would have preferred to use iPhones and Macs in the past, but the lack of those features were deal breakers from the IT department perspective. Now there seems to be much less of a reason for IT depts. to be against Apple products.
I bought one of the original iPhones when it came out, and I would stay it is still by far the best consumer electronics device I've owned. A big reason I like it so much is that for the past two years I've been able to get the vast majority of useful new features for free due to the OS updates. I think of all the features that I actually USE on a regular basis that didn't exist when I first bought the phone, like the music store, the app store, cell triangulation, and all the functionality provided by the apps, and I'd say this is the first phone I've owned that didn't start to feel outdated right after I bought it.
In fact, I've never even really felt that compelled to upgrade because, for me, the majority of the functionality in the new phones is in the OS vs. the hardware.
Can someone explain why turning biomass into usable forms of energy is ever a good idea? After all, all biomass is really just a way to turn solar energy into fuel. It always seemed to me that it would be a heck of a lot more efficient to just set up a bunch of mirrors to heat water to power a steam turbine. Is growing corn, or switchgrass, or whatever that much cheaper?
I also never understood why people were so concerned about turning biomass into ethanol. I was recently reading about a power plant that was being designed to use ethanol from a nearby ethanol plant. Again, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper and more efficient to just design a power plant that burned plant matter directly for fuel?
These aren't rhetorical questions. I'm interested if anyone has real insight into what the total energy benefits are. Is it really just a case of "the corn lobby"?
Jakob Nielsen argued that frames "broke the fundamental user model of the web page"... back in 1996. Sorry, the user model of the web has fundamentally changed since then.
For example, in the google image case, I really like the frame because it serves an important purpose. Often times it takes much longer to load the target page than the top frame. If that loading takes too long, I can just click the "See full size image" to go directly to the image without having to load the whole page.
In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.
Here's why this was a colossally stupid idea on Time Warner's part: they were destined to piss off their savviest users who know the most about how to switch. Even though TWC is the "default" high-bandwidth option in Austin, there are alternatives in most places. While Suzy homemaker reading emails and doing light web surfing probably doesn't know much about those other options, the heavy users do. There was a huge revolt among the tech-savvy in Austin - local tech mailing lists became a TWC bitchfest, with pretty much everyone saying they weren't only going to cancel their own service if this went through, but they were going to actively help their friends and family members quit as well.
In fairness, that article is a report that Time Warner was originally planning to postpone the cap tests until later this year. The news here is that now they've scrapped the idea altogether. A big difference, especially if you live in Austin.
This article writer is a tool. Interestingly enough, most of these restrictions (no filesystem access, no sockets, no spawning threads) are EXACTLY the same restrictions as recommended by Sun for EJB: http://java.sun.com/blueprints/qanda/ejb_tier/restrictions.html
This story has been getting a lot of press in the news along the lines of "stupid politicians try to silence brave scientist," but seriously, what would YOU have done if you were those politicians? Were they supposed to just have everyone stand outside for a week? What if it had been two? The fact is, earthquake prediction is pretty useless until you get very high accuracy (something like > 90% of the time) with a very small time window (less than a day).
Guess what, there is going to be a major, devastating earthquake in California very soon. Though I'm pretty much guaranteed to be right, should I expect everyone to leave CA until it happens?
This is totally wrong. A lot of buyers of CDS contracts didn't even own the underlying bonds - In some cases CDS contracts were written for significantly more than the total amount of a particular bond issue!
The buyers were betting that the issuers would default.
But in corporate environments, I could imagine a case where the drives could be decrypted with two different keys: a user key specific to the drive, and a master key maintained by the IT department. For the master key, different people know different parts of the key (or, for example, half the key is stored in one safe deposit box and the other half in a different box where access to the boxes is by different people). Then, on the disk, the data is encrypted with the user's key, and the user's key is also placed on the disk, itself encrypted with the master key.
Now, if a user forgets their key, it's possible to still get their data, albeit it's more of a pain in the ass.
Mod parent up. Gladwell very explicitly points out that very successful people ARE different than your average joe and that they do have very rare talents. His point, though, is that this alone is not enough - you also need to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and you need to put in a huge amount of training.
Back in 2000, I bought a Toyota Echo that gets about 40 miles/gallon. In 2002, even though I could have afforded more I bought a small condo, skipping out on an ARM to get a 30 yr fixed rate. Now I'm learning that I should have bought a gas-guzzler so I could get free cash down the road, I should have taken out a huge ARM on an overpriced house because the gov would get my lender to reduce the principal anyway, and maybe I should have tried to run a company or two into the ground to get a mammoth bailout. Why is the government trying to take away every incentive to act prudently and responsibly?
Your data is not relevant, and Jobs and Patrick Swayze are going throgh very different things. Jobs had/has a neuroendocrine tumor, which is much more survivable than the much more common adenocarcinoma that Swayze has, which has a 5% 5-year survival rate. Jobs basically has a completely different type of cancer than you usually think of when you hear the term pancreatic cancer.
Mod parent up. Dell rose to prominence in an era of "beige box" PCs where the value of any PC could pretty much be explained as the sum total of a list of its parts. Now, especially with the business switching to laptops, people want to be able to touch and try out a computer before they buy it, and not having any physical presence was killing Dell while Apple and HP were cleaning up. Also, in the early 90s, no one really cared what a PC looked like. Today's "Apple premium" shows that people are willing to pay for good design, something Dell has never been good at.
Not keeping up with a changing business environment is the surest way to kill a company.
Slashdot Mirror
150 or so police officers
By saying "or so" I'm assuming that 0 is included in this estimate? Seriously, do you have any reference at all for this number? How the hell was this modded interesting?
If so, could I interest you in some waterfront property in Florida?
Why, actually, yes. But in truth, I could care less.
Mod parent up. If you're going to commit a felony that will result in significant jail time, at least rob a bank or a high end jewelery store. Instead they steal an easily tracked, serial-numbered product with a ridiculously low fence-to-retail value. Furthermore, their crime is newsworthy enough ("Look at those shiny macbooks disappear!") that they manage to get coverage on major websites and news outlets.
Finally, they incur the wrath of apple fanboys everywhere now determined to track them down: "Did you see how they handled those MacBooks! They might even have scratched the case!!!"
They're pretty much unrelated. Savana doesn't aim to provide all of the functionality of git. What it DOES do is make it really easy to work "the right way" with SVN, with "the right way" defined as:
1. Every time I'm going to code a new feature/bug fix, I do it in a private branch.
2. I checkin normally on this branch.
3. When I'm ready to promote my changes, I first sync down any more recent changes from the trunk.
4. Optionally, I can have someone else look at my branch to do a code read.
5. I promote (merge my changes back to trunk) and drop my private branch.
It's currently possible to work like this now with subversion, but it's pretty ugly and a pain requiring long commands, and developers generally don't like it because it is such a pain to set up the private branches and merge them, so they end up just doing everything in trunk. Savana is essentially just syntactic sugar on top of (potentially multiple) underlying uglier svn commands. Savana aims to make it easy to set up and merge private branches, lowering developer resistance to using them.
Friends of mine have open-sourced savana, http://savana.codehaus.org/ a thin layer on top of Subversion that makes it easy to do all work in private branches before promoting to the trunk. A common workflow is:
sav createuserbranch mybranch --calls svn copy under the covers to create user branch named mybranch ... normal checkins using svn commit go to YOUR private branch ... when you are ready to promote your changes back to the trunk:
sav sync -- pulls in any changes made to trunk since your private branch was created so you can test locally
sav promote -- merges your changes back into the trunk
The thing I like about this thin "workspace managing" layer on top of Subversion is that for the most part you can take advantage of existing tool support for subversion (like integrated IntelliJ Idea and Eclipse support), as all of the savana commands just call svn commands under the covers.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I found the details of the article very interesting. Of 299 US government loans to Micronesians, over 200 were not paid up!! That makes subprime loans look like gold. Basically, the Micronesians are treating these as gifts, not loans. And why not - it's obvious the lender (that would be you, the American taxpayer) doesn't have any real recourse to collect. It's not like the Micronesians have anything to fear from US credit bureaus, who can't even track them adequately.
In other words, the US government tries to pretend these are loans by putting SSNs on the accounts, which ends up screwing over some hapless US citizen, when they should just treat them as gifts, because in reality it looks like they are.
Ugg, how is it that the parent is modded down but the GP is modded insightful? The GP is basically just saying "well, that doesn't feel like enough to me", while the parent points out accurately that it very easy to determine what the probability is that the results are due to chance. Since the article states that the researchers obtained "significantly" more cigarettes, I'm assuming that this is at least based on the common level of 5%. You can have a small sample size that is highly statistically significant if the skew is large enough. Unfortunately, even on slashdot, most people don't understand statistics.
That said, hypothesis testing just determines the probability that the results are NOT due to chance. Thus, it's totally possible that the results are due to something different that what the researchers propose - maybe they were just friendlier when asking from the right side.
Actually, the big news to me that seems to be somewhat lost on the slashdot crowd is how Apple is really gunning for the business market that RIM has previously owned. Remote wipe, hardware encryption, and Exchange support in Snow Leopard are HUGE for businesses. I think that lots of businesses (or at least many of the employees of those businesses) would have preferred to use iPhones and Macs in the past, but the lack of those features were deal breakers from the IT department perspective. Now there seems to be much less of a reason for IT depts. to be against Apple products.
I bought one of the original iPhones when it came out, and I would stay it is still by far the best consumer electronics device I've owned. A big reason I like it so much is that for the past two years I've been able to get the vast majority of useful new features for free due to the OS updates. I think of all the features that I actually USE on a regular basis that didn't exist when I first bought the phone, like the music store, the app store, cell triangulation, and all the functionality provided by the apps, and I'd say this is the first phone I've owned that didn't start to feel outdated right after I bought it.
In fact, I've never even really felt that compelled to upgrade because, for me, the majority of the functionality in the new phones is in the OS vs. the hardware.
You say:
Are there any obvious problems you would foresee?
and then a sentence later:
A major issue is, of course, the fact that my pseudo-netbook has to be carried everywhere and left always on.
I would consider this a pretty big obvious problem.
Another poster has said this before, but unfettered democracy is just two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.
I think it's more like "Shipping your browser as the default on Windows" creates popularity...
Can someone explain why turning biomass into usable forms of energy is ever a good idea? After all, all biomass is really just a way to turn solar energy into fuel. It always seemed to me that it would be a heck of a lot more efficient to just set up a bunch of mirrors to heat water to power a steam turbine. Is growing corn, or switchgrass, or whatever that much cheaper?
I also never understood why people were so concerned about turning biomass into ethanol. I was recently reading about a power plant that was being designed to use ethanol from a nearby ethanol plant. Again, wouldn't it be a heck of a lot cheaper and more efficient to just design a power plant that burned plant matter directly for fuel?
These aren't rhetorical questions. I'm interested if anyone has real insight into what the total energy benefits are. Is it really just a case of "the corn lobby"?
Jakob Nielsen argued that frames "broke the fundamental user model of the web page" ... back in 1996. Sorry, the user model of the web has fundamentally changed since then.
For example, in the google image case, I really like the frame because it serves an important purpose. Often times it takes much longer to load the target page than the top frame. If that loading takes too long, I can just click the "See full size image" to go directly to the image without having to load the whole page.
In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.
As he works for Gartner, I would wonder if I had been transported to an alternate universe if he were spewing anything BESIDES idiotic terminology.
Here's why this was a colossally stupid idea on Time Warner's part: they were destined to piss off their savviest users who know the most about how to switch. Even though TWC is the "default" high-bandwidth option in Austin, there are alternatives in most places. While Suzy homemaker reading emails and doing light web surfing probably doesn't know much about those other options, the heavy users do. There was a huge revolt among the tech-savvy in Austin - local tech mailing lists became a TWC bitchfest, with pretty much everyone saying they weren't only going to cancel their own service if this went through, but they were going to actively help their friends and family members quit as well.
In fairness, that article is a report that Time Warner was originally planning to postpone the cap tests until later this year. The news here is that now they've scrapped the idea altogether. A big difference, especially if you live in Austin.
This article writer is a tool. Interestingly enough, most of these restrictions (no filesystem access, no sockets, no spawning threads) are EXACTLY the same restrictions as recommended by Sun for EJB: http://java.sun.com/blueprints/qanda/ejb_tier/restrictions.html
This story has been getting a lot of press in the news along the lines of "stupid politicians try to silence brave scientist," but seriously, what would YOU have done if you were those politicians? Were they supposed to just have everyone stand outside for a week? What if it had been two? The fact is, earthquake prediction is pretty useless until you get very high accuracy (something like > 90% of the time) with a very small time window (less than a day).
Guess what, there is going to be a major, devastating earthquake in California very soon. Though I'm pretty much guaranteed to be right, should I expect everyone to leave CA until it happens?
This is totally wrong. A lot of buyers of CDS contracts didn't even own the underlying bonds - In some cases CDS contracts were written for significantly more than the total amount of a particular bond issue!
The buyers were betting that the issuers would default.
But in corporate environments, I could imagine a case where the drives could be decrypted with two different keys: a user key specific to the drive, and a master key maintained by the IT department. For the master key, different people know different parts of the key (or, for example, half the key is stored in one safe deposit box and the other half in a different box where access to the boxes is by different people). Then, on the disk, the data is encrypted with the user's key, and the user's key is also placed on the disk, itself encrypted with the master key.
Now, if a user forgets their key, it's possible to still get their data, albeit it's more of a pain in the ass.
Mod parent up. Gladwell very explicitly points out that very successful people ARE different than your average joe and that they do have very rare talents. His point, though, is that this alone is not enough - you also need to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and you need to put in a huge amount of training.
Back in 2000, I bought a Toyota Echo that gets about 40 miles/gallon. In 2002, even though I could have afforded more I bought a small condo, skipping out on an ARM to get a 30 yr fixed rate. Now I'm learning that I should have bought a gas-guzzler so I could get free cash down the road, I should have taken out a huge ARM on an overpriced house because the gov would get my lender to reduce the principal anyway, and maybe I should have tried to run a company or two into the ground to get a mammoth bailout. Why is the government trying to take away every incentive to act prudently and responsibly?
Your data is not relevant, and Jobs and Patrick Swayze are going throgh very different things. Jobs had/has a neuroendocrine tumor, which is much more survivable than the much more common adenocarcinoma that Swayze has, which has a 5% 5-year survival rate. Jobs basically has a completely different type of cancer than you usually think of when you hear the term pancreatic cancer.
Mod parent up. Dell rose to prominence in an era of "beige box" PCs where the value of any PC could pretty much be explained as the sum total of a list of its parts. Now, especially with the business switching to laptops, people want to be able to touch and try out a computer before they buy it, and not having any physical presence was killing Dell while Apple and HP were cleaning up. Also, in the early 90s, no one really cared what a PC looked like. Today's "Apple premium" shows that people are willing to pay for good design, something Dell has never been good at.
Not keeping up with a changing business environment is the surest way to kill a company.