It's also quite cool if a customer types slowly, that way, I can continue to do what I was doing at the same time, but anyway, it's very rare that our customers are typing that slow..
If your system only gives you one customer at a time and your performance is evaluated based on through-put you wouldn't be happy about that.
How about not worrying about every possible abnormality and just banning everybody except for XX and XY?
practical problem is that the abnomalies are very strongly represented among today's top athletes and while introducing such a rule from the ground up may be possible (but extremely controversial) sending existing top athletes into early retirement because of it would be impossible to communicate.
Its just like the Cold War again, when every Games was full of rumors about those cheatin' commies, and their doping.
you might want to have a look at all the GDR doping practices (and victims) that became known after the reunification of Germany - today's understanding is that
doping contributed massively to their success at international events and that they were completely willing to sacrifice the long-term health of their athletes (without any informed consent on the athletes' part).
When Michael Phelps was her age, he dropped 7 seconds in the 400 IM (from 4:22 to 2:15 - or 2.6% gain) and 2.5 seconds (from 2:03.4 to 2:00.8 - or 2% in the 200 IM from age 15 to age 16. Basically, the same statistical improvement, or even a little more. No one even suggested his gains were anything other then natural.
What could possibly be different between expected performance changes for an adolescent man and woman?
here's a revolutionary thought - the male might have a strongly rising testosterone level during that time (rises very fast during puberty, peaks in the mid twenties) which we would expect to increase his performance - whereas we would expect a female athlete to have a much smaller rise in testosterone level and some adverse effects from increasing estrogen levels as well-
I know I am going to come off as a 'shill' but MS tools rock (I am not talking about their frameworks). It is the one thing that holds me to windows these days. All those tools you mention are available in windows and usually better polished. Valgrind compaired to say using boundschecker. You goto valgrind and bisect issues, boundschecker puts you right on the offending line that they think either overwrote memory or leaked. There are dozens of tools in windows like that. Valgrind is good for what it is (and better than nothing) but needs major work. If I am looking for memory/threading issues I usually port it to windows then debug it there. Most of the the IDE frameworks out there are clumsy wrappers around GDB. They have really improved in the past 5 years. But they still have a long way to go. Dont get me wrong. There is a tool for everything and many that are better than windows. But many are clumsy and tedious to use.
on a lossely related note - I really liked Shark on OS X when I did some development on that platform.
They aren't really porting the game for its own sake - they are porting the most recent version of their Source engine and L4D 2 is basically one huge glorified testcase.
There are actually very few(nearly none) video games out there that max out any CPU these days. Its all GPU now.
MMOs are more popular than ever and are very CPU heavy - RIFT has to be one of the worst CPU hogs I know (my 2.8 GHz Phenom II x4 is at the very bottom-end of acceptable processors and even WoW did profit from going 64bit in benchmarks (definitely not due to memory but 32bit WoW does not require SSE2 iirc - so the performance gain is probably a mix between being able to rely on more modern instruction sets and having more registers available).
Re:MS is out of touch unless it's with chairs
on
Windows 8 Is Ready
·
· Score: 1
The meme at the time mostly surrounded the term 'metrosexual' and if MS didn't understand that 'Metro' would be associated this make my OP even more poignant.
you yourself concede that that meme "has faded considerably by now" so I doubt that would be a huge concern (and I'd think that spread of that meme was limited to a very small subgroup of total Windows users in the first place)
the metro design language is based off the signs found at Seattle metro stations so the name is kinda obvious - and Metro is really nothing the average computer user gets directly confronted with or has to know by name, it's a set of UI design guidelines nothing more. How many users read that sort of stuff or are interested in its codename?
I don't know... at the very least since the Hague Conventions.
The idea that war can be lead in a civilized and restricted way is a prerequisite of public acceptance (and of finding people willing to sign up for your military).
Rules like "no B/C weapons", "no anti-person landmines", "no cluster bombs", "medical assistance strictly based on severity of injury not on nationality",... are efforts (which at least the civilized countries take very seriously) to fight wars in a contained and sportsman-like way.
It's hard to do without a real Army. Just look at what China is doing in the South China Sea.
Just last week China said it was going to unilaterally have its military garrison a group of disputed oil rich islands off the coast of Vietnam and as much as the other countries want to protest, they can't do jack shit about it because not only do they want to be good trading partners with China, they cannot afford a shooting war with China.
So yeah, keeping the peace also means being able to put up a fight if one breaks out.
so is it the Chinese military or their economy that hives them this power?
Sometimes it takes hours for an email to get to me from down the damned hall, we never had that problem with Novell and I never saw that problem with any other email system, either.
email is not designed to be delivered within any specific timeframe (something all the "click the link in the email we just sent you to activate your account" services would do very good to remember) - if you want instant communication than use a proper IM.
as for domain name/brand recognition - I use fastmail.fm for my primary email account and while I am very happy with the service and functionality they provide it is kinda annoying that I have to spell out the domain name three times every time I give someone my email address (not living in an english-speaking country) - people are familiar with gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com and 1-2 local email providers and would immediately recognize outlook (because they already associate it with email) but hvaing an unfamiliar domain name causes considerable unnecessary trouble as non-technical people (a) don't know how to spell it and (b) get confused about such a non-standard email address (omg it ends in ".fm" are you sure that is correct? or ymail.com which nobody understands when you pronounce it in English and which can't be pronounced in the local language). You don't realize how important having a known domain in your email address is until you don't have one.
I'd count graft as at least a subset of corruption. It's still rotten.
That's your privilege, but it pretty much requires that you ignore the actual meaning of the words. Graft is bribes to do your job, corruption is bribes to break the law.
Note that accepting bribes to do your job is not illegal or immoral in most cultures.
economic literature on the subject does not make that distinction - the only common distinction is corruption without theft (e.g. "pay me a fee so I bump you to the top of the line") and corruption with theft (e.g. "pay me $10 and I will ignore the $40 speeding ticket I would have to write otherwise").
The first is relatively easy to combat as the people suffer from it and once you create awareness (ad campaigns, anonymous hotlines,...) they are generally happy to help the administration in fighting it (South Africa had significant success with awareness campaigns). The second type is a real problem as the citizen and the official conspire to defraud the state and none of them has any interest in stopping that practice.
My family has a military background as well (I also have many friends who are former enlisted or officers) and I share a similar perspective... Unfortunately, I know in my gut that there was a time when ethical, honor-bound even compasionate Germans were having this same exact discussion - and apparently they couldn't (or wouldn't) see it coming, either (I guess I might not want to, either!).
This is a very good point. When I was doing my military service I was given the opportunity to attend a talk by Philipp v. Boeselager who was one of the last survivors of the German military resistance during the 3rd Reich (he passed away in 2008).
Von Boeselager's main topic was not the difficulty of organizing resistance and the various assassination plans that failed - he mostly spoke about how difficult it was for him and his friends - honor-bound German officers who had sworn their oath of allegiance not to the constitution, not to the people, not to the Reich but to the person Hitler - to even contemplate the notion of tyrannicide. They knew that what Hitler did was awful in human terms and would ruin the German people and nation if not stopped - but the only way to stop him went against everything that made up their ethos as German officers. They had sworn a holy oath to defend this man with their lives and now they were plotting to kill him.
Germany spontaneously deciding to shut down manu of its nuclear power stations (which has caused crippling price rises for the population as the country has had to buy electricity from foreign nuclear power stations).
citation needed
I am a German living in Germany and I don't see these "crippling price rises" you speak of. And while plants (the 7 oldest ones plus one with a long history of mishaps) were shut down "spontaneously" your post ignores that the main reaction was just to revert to the original exit plan that had been put into law in 2002, removing the modifications from 2010.
One way or another Germany abandoning nuclear power had been coming for a very long time and was anything but "spontaneous".
where do I gain the expertise to be a subject matter expert (in several areas) and length of time in which to review all relevant code?
this. even if there are no intentional backdoors there might still be side channels that leak crucial information (e.g. Skype didn't pad its packets for a long time which allowed the reconstruction of conversations simply by looking at the data volume transferred and comparing that against a database of known patterns without breaking any sort of encryption).
Boot from CD or USB is usually automatic, or a function key press during startup. You usually don't have to go into the BIOS unless the machine has already been locked down.
still may have to turn off MBR protection - many PCs have it turned on by default to prevent viruses from putting their own bootloader there.
I'm sorry but you really need to learn your history. The word "PC" comes from "IBM PC compatible" which is X86. Now if you want to say its a personal computer? Fine and dandy, but a PC is an X86 unit, a personal computer is whatever.
so any x86 which does not have an IBM-compatible BIOS (e.g uses EFI) cannot be called a PC?
First of all, why do you need to preserve SO much information? Simply put: "This place is poison. Invisible poison will kill you, slowly. You will not feel it, but your hair will fall out, your teeth will bleed, food will not nourish you, and you will sicken and die. Your babies will be deformed, if you have any at all. For your own safety, leave now and do not return. There is nothing of value here." Repeat it in every language currently known. Make it readable by the unaided eye.
Proto-Indo-European which is basically the earliest point to which we can reconstruct the Indo-European languages was spoken ~4.000 years ago.
And you think anyone will still understand any language of an existing language/grammar in 1m years?
Also, the assumption here is that in a million years humans, aliens, whomever, won't have the technology to detect those dumps. Heck in a million years they could probably be detected and neutralized from orbit.
this.
Human agriculture (which is a good starting point for "civilization") is 7.000-8.000 years old and we worry about transferring information 1.000.000 years into the future?
imho that's an absurd engineering requirement - build a warning that is guaranteed to last 2.000-3.000 years and you can at least hope that part of our civilization is still recognizable and that the language barrier can be overcome by future researchers; maybe build it to last 10.000 years if you have some sort of Ozymandias-complex.
But 1m years is almost the same as trying to communicate with aliens.
Fedora is basically the experimental version of RedHat - Red Hat uses Fedora to test the integration of bleeding edge (Desktop) technology which then will eventually end up in RHEL.
In my (3-4 years old) experience this results in every Fedora version upgrade breaking something new.
I think the original Fedora codebase (when they migrated from being a set of extra repositories to being a full-blown distro) was taken from the (discontinued) Red Hat Linux, with some caveats (see above rgd stability) Fedora has taken the role of desktop Red Hat Linux.
There aren't really any non-niche replacement options for ThunderBird or Outlook since Eudora was killed by Qualcomm. I've tried several of the better ones, and they're universally painful to use.
It's actually unfortunate that there's not a binary compiled version of RoundCube, because it has a reasonably usable interface for a web client.
Evolution is quite nice but doesn't have a working windows port afaik
Slashdot Mirror
It's also quite cool if a customer types slowly, that way, I can continue to do what I was doing at the same time, but anyway, it's very rare that our customers are typing that slow..
If your system only gives you one customer at a time and your performance is evaluated based on through-put you wouldn't be happy about that.
How about not worrying about every possible abnormality and just banning everybody except for XX and XY?
practical problem is that the abnomalies are very strongly represented among today's top athletes and while introducing such a rule from the ground up may be possible (but extremely controversial) sending existing top athletes into early retirement because of it would be impossible to communicate.
Its just like the Cold War again, when every Games was full of rumors about those cheatin' commies, and their doping.
you might want to have a look at all the GDR doping practices (and victims) that became known after the reunification of Germany - today's understanding is that
doping contributed massively to their success at international events and that they were completely willing to sacrifice the long-term health of their athletes (without any informed consent on the athletes' part).
Heidi Krieger
was doped with anabolic steroids to the point where she had to undergo a sex change to live a somewhat normal life.
When Michael Phelps was her age, he dropped 7 seconds in the 400 IM (from 4:22 to 2:15 - or 2.6% gain) and 2.5 seconds (from 2:03.4 to 2:00.8 - or 2% in the 200 IM from age 15 to age 16. Basically, the same statistical improvement, or even a little more. No one even suggested his gains were anything other then natural.
What could possibly be different between expected performance changes for an adolescent man and woman?
here's a revolutionary thought - the male might have a strongly rising testosterone level during that time (rises very fast during puberty, peaks in the mid twenties) which we would expect to increase his performance - whereas we would expect a female athlete to have a much smaller rise in testosterone level and some adverse effects from increasing estrogen levels as well-
I know I am going to come off as a 'shill' but MS tools rock (I am not talking about their frameworks). It is the one thing that holds me to windows these days. All those tools you mention are available in windows and usually better polished. Valgrind compaired to say using boundschecker. You goto valgrind and bisect issues, boundschecker puts you right on the offending line that they think either overwrote memory or leaked. There are dozens of tools in windows like that. Valgrind is good for what it is (and better than nothing) but needs major work. If I am looking for memory/threading issues I usually port it to windows then debug it there. Most of the the IDE frameworks out there are clumsy wrappers around GDB. They have really improved in the past 5 years. But they still have a long way to go. Dont get me wrong. There is a tool for everything and many that are better than windows. But many are clumsy and tedious to use.
on a lossely related note - I really liked Shark on OS X when I did some development on that platform.
They aren't really porting the game for its own sake - they are porting the most recent version of their Source engine and L4D 2 is basically one huge glorified testcase.
What's "olympia"? The plural of "olympium"?
Olympia is the place where the first olypmics were carried out and what the olympics are called in my languages.
There are actually very few(nearly none) video games out there that max out any CPU these days. Its all GPU now.
MMOs are more popular than ever and are very CPU heavy - RIFT has to be one of the worst CPU hogs I know (my 2.8 GHz Phenom II x4 is at the very bottom-end of acceptable processors and even WoW did profit from going 64bit in benchmarks (definitely not due to memory but 32bit WoW does not require SSE2 iirc - so the performance gain is probably a mix between being able to rely on more modern instruction sets and having more registers available).
The meme at the time mostly surrounded the term 'metrosexual' and if MS didn't understand that 'Metro' would be associated this make my OP even more poignant.
you yourself concede that that meme "has faded considerably by now" so I doubt that would be a huge concern (and I'd think that spread of that meme was limited to a very small subgroup of total Windows users in the first place)
the metro design language is based off the signs found at Seattle metro stations so the name is kinda obvious - and Metro is really nothing the average computer user gets directly confronted with or has to know by name, it's a set of UI design guidelines nothing more. How many users read that sort of stuff or are interested in its codename?
Since when is the goal of war "sportsmanship"?
Grow up.
I don't know... at the very least since the Hague Conventions.
The idea that war can be lead in a civilized and restricted way is a prerequisite of public acceptance (and of finding people willing to sign up for your military).
Rules like "no B/C weapons", "no anti-person landmines", "no cluster bombs", "medical assistance strictly based on severity of injury not on nationality", ... are efforts (which at least the civilized countries take very seriously) to fight wars in a contained and sportsman-like way.
It's hard to do without a real Army. Just look at what China is doing in the South China Sea.
Just last week China said it was going to unilaterally have its military garrison a group of disputed oil rich islands off the coast of Vietnam and as much as the other countries want to protest, they can't do jack shit about it because not only do they want to be good trading partners with China, they cannot afford a shooting war with China.
So yeah, keeping the peace also means being able to put up a fight if one breaks out.
so is it the Chinese military or their economy that hives them this power?
Sometimes it takes hours for an email to get to me from down the damned hall, we never had that problem with Novell and I never saw that problem with any other email system, either.
email is not designed to be delivered within any specific timeframe (something all the "click the link in the email we just sent you to activate your account" services would do very good to remember) - if you want instant communication than use a proper IM.
as for domain name/brand recognition - I use fastmail.fm for my primary email account and while I am very happy with the service and functionality they provide it is kinda annoying that I have to spell out the domain name three times every time I give someone my email address (not living in an english-speaking country) - people are familiar with gmail.com, yahoo.com, hotmail.com and 1-2 local email providers and would immediately recognize outlook (because they already associate it with email) but hvaing an unfamiliar domain name causes considerable unnecessary trouble as non-technical people (a) don't know how to spell it and (b) get confused about such a non-standard email address (omg it ends in ".fm" are you sure that is correct? or ymail.com which nobody understands when you pronounce it in English and which can't be pronounced in the local language). You don't realize how important having a known domain in your email address is until you don't have one.
That's your privilege, but it pretty much requires that you ignore the actual meaning of the words. Graft is bribes to do your job, corruption is bribes to break the law.
Note that accepting bribes to do your job is not illegal or immoral in most cultures.
economic literature on the subject does not make that distinction - the only common distinction is corruption without theft (e.g. "pay me a fee so I bump you to the top of the line") and corruption with theft (e.g. "pay me $10 and I will ignore the $40 speeding ticket I would have to write otherwise").
The first is relatively easy to combat as the people suffer from it and once you create awareness (ad campaigns, anonymous hotlines, ...) they are generally happy to help the administration in fighting it (South Africa had significant success with awareness campaigns). The second type is a real problem as the citizen and the official conspire to defraud the state and none of them has any interest in stopping that practice.
My family has a military background as well (I also have many friends who are former enlisted or officers) and I share a similar perspective... Unfortunately, I know in my gut that there was a time when ethical, honor-bound even compasionate Germans were having this same exact discussion - and apparently they couldn't (or wouldn't) see it coming, either (I guess I might not want to, either!).
This is a very good point. When I was doing my military service I was given the opportunity to attend a talk by Philipp v. Boeselager who was one of the last survivors of the German military resistance during the 3rd Reich (he passed away in 2008).
Von Boeselager's main topic was not the difficulty of organizing resistance and the various assassination plans that failed - he mostly spoke about how difficult it was for him and his friends - honor-bound German officers who had sworn their oath of allegiance not to the constitution, not to the people, not to the Reich but to the person Hitler - to even contemplate the notion of tyrannicide. They knew that what Hitler did was awful in human terms and would ruin the German people and nation if not stopped - but the only way to stop him went against everything that made up their ethos as German officers. They had sworn a holy oath to defend this man with their lives and now they were plotting to kill him.
Germany spontaneously deciding to shut down manu of its nuclear power stations (which has caused crippling price rises for the population as the country has had to buy electricity from foreign nuclear power stations).
citation needed
I am a German living in Germany and I don't see these "crippling price rises" you speak of. And while plants (the 7 oldest ones plus one with a long history of mishaps) were shut down "spontaneously" your post ignores that the main reaction was just to revert to the original exit plan that had been put into law in 2002, removing the modifications from 2010.
One way or another Germany abandoning nuclear power had been coming for a very long time and was anything but "spontaneous".
where do I gain the expertise to be a subject matter expert (in several areas) and length of time in which to review all relevant code?
this. even if there are no intentional backdoors there might still be side channels that leak crucial information (e.g. Skype didn't pad its packets for a long time which allowed the reconstruction of conversations simply by looking at the data volume transferred and comparing that against a database of known patterns without breaking any sort of encryption).
Boot from CD or USB is usually automatic, or a function key press during startup. You usually don't have to go into the BIOS unless the machine has already been locked down.
still may have to turn off MBR protection - many PCs have it turned on by default to prevent viruses from putting their own bootloader there.
I'm sorry but you really need to learn your history. The word "PC" comes from "IBM PC compatible" which is X86. Now if you want to say its a personal computer? Fine and dandy, but a PC is an X86 unit, a personal computer is whatever.
so any x86 which does not have an IBM-compatible BIOS (e.g uses EFI) cannot be called a PC?
You don't own that physical object, therefore not yours to play with.
the computer is exhibited in the store for the very purpose of you to play with it
First of all, why do you need to preserve SO much information? Simply put: "This place is poison. Invisible poison will kill you, slowly. You will not feel it, but your hair will fall out, your teeth will bleed, food will not nourish you, and you will sicken and die. Your babies will be deformed, if you have any at all. For your own safety, leave now and do not return. There is nothing of value here." Repeat it in every language currently known. Make it readable by the unaided eye.
Proto-Indo-European which is basically the earliest point to which we can reconstruct the Indo-European languages was spoken ~4.000 years ago.
And you think anyone will still understand any language of an existing language/grammar in 1m years?
Homo Sapiens itself is just ~250.000 years old.
Also, the assumption here is that in a million years humans, aliens, whomever, won't have the technology to detect those dumps. Heck in a million years they could probably be detected and neutralized from orbit.
this.
Human agriculture (which is a good starting point for "civilization") is 7.000-8.000 years old and we worry about transferring information 1.000.000 years into the future?
imho that's an absurd engineering requirement - build a warning that is guaranteed to last 2.000-3.000 years and you can at least hope that part of our civilization is still recognizable and that the language barrier can be overcome by future researchers; maybe build it to last 10.000 years if you have some sort of Ozymandias-complex.
But 1m years is almost the same as trying to communicate with aliens.
Fedora is basically the experimental version of RedHat - Red Hat uses Fedora to test the integration of bleeding edge (Desktop) technology which then will eventually end up in RHEL.
In my (3-4 years old) experience this results in every Fedora version upgrade breaking something new.
I think the original Fedora codebase (when they migrated from being a set of extra repositories to being a full-blown distro) was taken from the (discontinued) Red Hat Linux, with some caveats (see above rgd stability) Fedora has taken the role of desktop Red Hat Linux.
There aren't really any non-niche replacement options for ThunderBird or Outlook since Eudora was killed by Qualcomm. I've tried several of the better ones, and they're universally painful to use.
It's actually unfortunate that there's not a binary compiled version of RoundCube, because it has a reasonably usable interface for a web client.
Evolution is quite nice but doesn't have a working windows port afaik
so you think it would be an awesome idea to invest additional training into people who are going to quit anyways?