If I were the owner I'd fire them regardless... How does firing her make up for the money loss, or the potentially dangerous system in place?
A couple of points
Systems are difficult to test in all contingencies. There is always a major rush to install because even extra days spent on features could result in millions of reduced productivity. Hence, users have to bear a lot of risk for a lot of possible reward.
If the higher-ups are fired, their replacements are prone to acquire a system that has fundamental flaws in other areas. They can't just turn around on the spot and install replacement software.
A chain is a strong as its weakest link. A company that can't afford to lose $251,000,000 should put the money into separate accounts.
There may be legal ways to nullify a contract - don't know Taiwanese law.
Another saying: if you play with fire, you're liable to get burnt. There's always a chance something will go wrong in spite of precautions because there is so much complexity. We just have to learn from mistakes and "not let history repeat itself."
When I was in university, a lot of people just left their stuff lying around assuming no one would care to touch what is not theirs. Generally, jail is a deterrent. However, it is quite easy to mistakenly sit down at the wrong seat and gather up something not yours - who would know the difference?
I travel with my computer and I don't want to forget it anywhere so I carry it with me at all times no matter how inconvenient it is. In other words I develop a habit of knowing that my computer has to be with me regardless of what I want to do.
Another tip - don't frequent areas where crime is rampant. Watch for people and keep with those you can trust.
Having a quad backup adds a huge amount of cost, both in terms of buying the extra components
A compromise might be more cost effective: A highly reliable dual backup is used regularly but an additional backup copy is made at less frequent intervals and stored in a special place. Of course, if the first two backups are toasted, you are going back a longer time though there is still something to recover.
to print all the permutations of the numbers from 1 to n (n being a parameter).
Then, for kicks, I started it with n=20. I knew that it would take a while, so I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation of how much RAM it might need to assemble the result... and came up with something like 20GB
Now wait. Once you've considered a permutation, you can forget it. You don't need more than O(n) memory.
If you were selecting without replacement the permutations at random, you will need to store indexes to the permutations, but the indexes can be compressed whenever blocks of permutations are selected.
You might imagine that very little future innovation may be required. Then there would be little point to keep highly skilled people employed. The company was willing to pay very likely quite a lot to achieve a goal though. Surely they were headed somewhere that would make it painless to retain their workforce, but maybe not. People are laid off from many jobs, often without replacement.
Is IT really innovating by providing new screens and reports? This kind of work becomes as easy as flipping burgers, though there are a lot of dollars at the responsibility of one little button on a screen. Programmers have to think of the next generation of software, especially intelligent software. Lotsa luck.
So, if you think it's going to take 3 hours to fix, just go out and buy a new computer
Let's consider probabilities, namely the probability of requiring much expert help given a problem. This probability is high enough that either a straight hardware swap or a ghost image is the most cost effective solution.
Better yet, every computer should come with a full complement of applications installed and preconfigured to run. By definition this system would include backup software so if there is any major problem you can recover from the recovery disk and restore all data.
Businesses are willing to pay fairly large sums for hassle-free computing.
Several people have noted that people coming straight from school just don't know what it's like to work in the profession studied for. That smacks of a serious gap in education.
Schools can't cover every workplace situation but they may be not addressing core teaching on how to work. Surely it is less costly to inform students uniformly in a classroom rather than let them go haphazardly into whatever they can get into and then have them absorb at the whim of their bosses. Even the erratic behavior of business should be addressed in classroom theory.
People looking for work are typically asked about their experience, usually to screen out people who don't know basics about working in the profession. The basics are so basic though. I've written software for many different businesses - there are so many little things that would have just easily been acquired in class, but university seems to have the attitude that they can just present idealized problems without the counterpart of practical processes that have a direct influence on many people (responsibility), rules, business goals, business psychology, mistakes, getting things to work, etc.
A university degree though is still a status of being able to be employed, earning more than minimum wage and capable of learning the nuances of business towards a fulfilling career.
It seems so needless for graduates to have to learn something they could learn in school.
There are many articles in business computing journals and business journals that students can read on their own to see what it can be like in the workplace.
Time in the way we conceive it may be an incomplete model of reality.
For instance, we accept that light speed is the maximum yet we think the universe is expanding faster than light. This is treated as though a central time has been running at a constant pace while space expands - but what if it is time itself that is speeding up so that everything is going to its future state earlier? Locally, clocks would run at the same rate, but they would be actually falling behind the universe's time.
It's not implausible since clocks don't have to run at the same pace everywhere, as shown by relativity. Indeed there may even be more than one "clock" experienced by any single point - we can have a local "clock", and the universe can have a central "clock".
Destruction is fairly easy as entropy runs its course but energy and materials can be used to create some order and in some cases restore, or at the very least, replicate past states. Thus we can conceivably build worlds that existed before. Thus a clock can make a quantum leap backwards.
A resurrected world would find itself embedded in a place where many resources have been spent to build it though. If resources still exist, as entropy unbuilds the world, it may seek to rebuild.
Everything we see is history. Light took time to travel to us. If we can determine our past from light that bounced off us and then off something far away and came back, or was bent around a black hole and came back, we could construct a past situation and interact with it. Though the inhabitants of the situation would be told what year they are supposed to be in, they would be in two different times.
So if we look to our past would we see history as told or an artificial constructive process?
Plus, how cool is it going to be to download Windows Server 2006 (or whatever it is) off a P2P
Given the MS desire for maintaining market share, you will most likely be able to download an evaluation version. Netscape was always available in "beta" form - who really needed to pay for a web browser?
Caveat emptor - wouldn't MS be really scrutinizing traffic in their own little P2P? Not to see who is sharing MS products, not really, but to keep tabs on world wide trends, which will make it much easier to keep people looking for new software. Without new features, people are pretty happy with the status quo (is not Windows 2000 retaining popularity?)
But what new features will really send people to upgrade big time? Speed, quality, reliability, automation, ease, flexibility are all attractive characteristics. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It is because of the amazing popularity of Windows
Tangentially, billions of people really consider Windows to serve them well. MS may have rushed it to the market without finding all the security holes - so now we need hackers to find them but also to disclose their results rather than exploit them.
Users, beware. Make your backups and know how to recover. This is a good policy even if the OS is secure.
On top of this, we have to be careful computers that reference our personal information may be compromised. Chaos can reign unexpectedly.
No one really needs their own fab just for custom designs. Existing fabs can construct custom chips.
Very fast decryption machines indeed.
Oddly, not much in the news about decrypted information being used by the government in court or the like. A lot of evidence exists as database information, spreadsheets, e-mail, websites, source code, photos, etc. - all plaintext.
Foreign powers planning an attack may communicate in such short bursts followed so quickly by the actual attack that all the decryption in the world can't figure out what is going on. How can Bin Laden send so many people to flying school for years without any NSA red flagging? Because no one talks. Loose lips sink ships.
Now guess what?? The NSA is working on mind reading. They have to. It's technologically possible. But now that we know what the NSA is working on, they only have a couple of years lead at most, right? 2010 - mind readers are coming to Best Buy, Nintendo, etc. No more mouse and keyboard. DVORAK vs. QWERTY will be academic.
Is the NSA working on mind altering devices?? Free will must be preserved.
Well well well. It seems that there really is some intuition in the idea that mathematics cannot be purchased per unit like fruit in a grocery store.
Paying for mathematic research is definitely liable to result in quality mathematical ideas, but intuition about the intangibles:
A. We may hit a barrier that no real gain in mathematics can be obtained regardless of how much money is humanly available.
For instance, suppose computers become intelligent and perform mathematic discovery very quickly. In the limit all resources that can be spent on mathematics will be - a sort of barrier.
At any rate, the automatic discovery of mathematics is a kind of algorithm for mathematics, less than an ability to prove everything true with finite resources, but capable of proving everything that can be paid for along a finite set of thought lines.
There is the problem of being forced to choose and thus consume resources, on the assumption that even a quantum computer cannot consider all choices. But who knows? It may be possible for a computer to handle all elements of infinite sets, maybe even uncountable sets!! Mathematics and physical reality may have far more in common than what we can tell.
B. Mathematics per dollar - a genius might see a solution quickly while an organization spends billions going nowhere. Did Fermat really know a proof but the NSA could have (and may have) dumped untold money while Wiles put the pieces together all by himself.
C. The result belongs to the mathematician first. Perhaps the proof becomes obvious but if it isn't a mathematician funded by the NSA could foresee a wonderful conclusion and find a more lucrative buyer.
Ultimately the human race can purchase mathematics but the NSA is a tiny bit more limited.
When I see FF, I think it means Fried Fish. There's a talk radio host named Scruff Connors who spells his name out. "... That's S-C-R-U-F-F as in Fried Fish" I think he retired or something, but he was pretty funny.
So when you started talking about fish in beer I know you put fried fish on your sister's computer.
The solution? Your toilet. Get the water out of the watertank. When it is lower then a certain level, it will refill. The toilet itself is perfect to get rid of water
Very well. The shower is even better for a water source. Start it on a drip and run that into a funnel. Because it is so high, no siphoning is required.
Further design ideas with flowing water. Use an IV bag full of cold water and let it slowly drip on your body, in the case a fan or electricity is not available. It must be questionable how much heat a fan can generate but they seem pretty efficient.
Sometimes I wonder how well water cooling really works when water just flows in a stream. If you blow hot room air into a cold shower will the bathroom get any colder? I suppose it's moot because the humidity will be a killer. Some air conditioners use cold water but they have numerous fins on the pipes in order to get massive surface area in contact with the air.
I wonder how much a car radiator costs - maybe no more than $50 just for a new one. Will it will rust while plain water goes through?
Patient people can fold a mega long copper tube into quite a space-filling array or use a large number of straight and T pieces to make such a contraption, which will have a large surface area.
A fan running on low is much more quiet and less energy consuming than an air conditioner. It's just a matter of whether comfort can be achieved at the sub $50 mark. Water based air conditioners can easily pump out 25000 BTU - there was one in a restaurant and it chilled the dining room quite fast. Get enough surface area on the pipes and you can make your living room pretty cold. Compressor-based refrigerators can go below the freezing point of water though. My food thermometer in the cold water tap never showed any temperature below 10 C although it reads 0 C for ice and 100 C for boiling water.
So if water might be put into a low-pressure chamber or bottle that allows water vapor to escape the room, the bottle could be used as a source of powerful cooling. Just not sure how to keep outside air from entering the bottle.
Not only this, if the freezer is in the same room as his "air conditioner" he is actually warming the room up by freezing the ice
I've seen a few perpetual motion rebuttals. But let me remind you of a couple of facts.
A. The cold water tap is a source of cold. The idea is to convert this source into cold air.
B. A freezer need not be in the same room. It could even be in the hot garage.
C. The room can be quite small so it won't take a lot of water to get a noticeable cooling. I tried the same thing once in a largish room and it didn't work because there was too much air. The air around the water cooled ok, and the water warmed up quickly but there was no comfort.
D. Air conditioners can be purchased for $100 or less. An extra $80 isn't a big deal in a first world country.
Still, the apparatus is useful in a situation where an air conditioner can't be easily mounted - these things are cubic and heavy, although surprisingly liftable once you are on your knees and your body is underneath. They really should have handles and perhaps telescopic legs.
If anyone is mounting an air conditioner into a wall/window, it can be lifted into place by this procedure: Get a large number of phone books from the phone company. They're free. Put machine on a board supported by a couple of phone books. Start low to the ground, as low as you can lift to. Add phone books to the left and right side to raise the unit without tipping it much until it is level with the place you are going to put it into. Now lift the machine up and in.
Common sense: if you are lifting to a high place you may need phone books in 4 corners and a wider board. Of course a project of this magnitude typically becomes tackled by a team whereas a water air cooler belongs in the realm of the individual, in which case everyone can just lift the machine into the opening.
I can say all of this after I lifted my air conditioner - from the side - along an aisle wide enough for just the machine into a hole in the wall. It was possible with one strategic knee motion and care not to impart acceleration in unfortunate directions. Just aim the centre of mass towards the opening and let inertia take over. Prior to this, adjust the body to be able to permit such motion without being dragged the wrong way by the machine. To avoid difficulties, practice swinging the machine a couple of degrees back and forth to know you can make the move while remaining stable. I wonder how much a car engine crane costs.
With all respect to university resource limitations, you would think they would be most proud of having their students attracting world attention, especially for something laudable.
Web pages for professors hardly get any news coverage, and these people are supposed to be at the top of the game. Surely research funding would leap to another quantum level if professors discussed on their websites how much impact or influence their research has, especially if those sites attracted page hits from large numbers of the public.
The adage of publish or perish seems to become perish and perish (i.e., lose, lose) when it comes to a little slashdotting.
If the management of Apple really wanted to try something revolutionary... However, Apple management chose the evolutionary establishment-approved route: x86...
Prediction: Apple will say now look how well Windows runs!
Slashdot Mirror
If I were the owner I'd fire them regardless ... How does firing her make up for the money loss, or the potentially dangerous system in place?
A couple of points
Systems are difficult to test in all contingencies. There is always a major rush to install because even extra days spent on features could result in millions of reduced productivity. Hence, users have to bear a lot of risk for a lot of possible reward.
If the higher-ups are fired, their replacements are prone to acquire a system that has fundamental flaws in other areas. They can't just turn around on the spot and install replacement software.
A chain is a strong as its weakest link. A company that can't afford to lose $251,000,000 should put the money into separate accounts.
There may be legal ways to nullify a contract - don't know Taiwanese law.
Another saying: if you play with fire, you're liable to get burnt. There's always a chance something will go wrong in spite of precautions because there is so much complexity. We just have to learn from mistakes and "not let history repeat itself."
Does the AIBO do Tae-Bo?
A fusion reactor cannot go boom
I suppose. Boom doesn't begin to describe a nova.
If you want to discourage theft I reckon the grunge look (ie case mod it to hell, as others suggest) is the only way
Ultra secure and grunge - a ball and chain
When I was in university, a lot of people just left their stuff lying around assuming no one would care to touch what is not theirs. Generally, jail is a deterrent. However, it is quite easy to mistakenly sit down at the wrong seat and gather up something not yours - who would know the difference?
I travel with my computer and I don't want to forget it anywhere so I carry it with me at all times no matter how inconvenient it is. In other words I develop a habit of knowing that my computer has to be with me regardless of what I want to do.
Another tip - don't frequent areas where crime is rampant. Watch for people and keep with those you can trust.
Hate to know what your odds are otherwise!
Having a quad backup adds a huge amount of cost, both in terms of buying the extra components
A compromise might be more cost effective: A highly reliable dual backup is used regularly but an additional backup copy is made at less frequent intervals and stored in a special place. Of course, if the first two backups are toasted, you are going back a longer time though there is still something to recover.
to print all the permutations of the numbers from 1 to n (n being a parameter).
Then, for kicks, I started it with n=20. I knew that it would take a while, so I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation of how much RAM it might need to assemble the result... and came up with something like 20GB
Now wait. Once you've considered a permutation, you can forget it. You don't need more than O(n) memory.
If you were selecting without replacement the permutations at random, you will need to store indexes to the permutations, but the indexes can be compressed whenever blocks of permutations are selected.
How can the Earth Simulator simulate the earth when it's slipping down the list compared to supercomputers on the earth?
You might imagine that very little future innovation may be required. Then there would be little point to keep highly skilled people employed. The company was willing to pay very likely quite a lot to achieve a goal though. Surely they were headed somewhere that would make it painless to retain their workforce, but maybe not. People are laid off from many jobs, often without replacement.
Is IT really innovating by providing new screens and reports? This kind of work becomes as easy as flipping burgers, though there are a lot of dollars at the responsibility of one little button on a screen. Programmers have to think of the next generation of software, especially intelligent software. Lotsa luck.
So, if you think it's going to take 3 hours to fix, just go out and buy a new computer
Let's consider probabilities, namely the probability of requiring much expert help given a problem. This probability is high enough that either a straight hardware swap or a ghost image is the most cost effective solution.
Better yet, every computer should come with a full complement of applications installed and preconfigured to run. By definition this system would include backup software so if there is any major problem you can recover from the recovery disk and restore all data.
Businesses are willing to pay fairly large sums for hassle-free computing.
20 minutes of company time to explain a password. I don't really know how that could happen.
..."
"Can you help me? It says the password is no good."
"What did you put in?"
"Doughnut"
"Well doughnut isn't good. People might guess doughnut. A lot of people eat doughnuts here."
Later.
"It still doesn't work."
"Was it something edible?"
"Salad. You mean food is rejected? That's pretty cool. How does the computer know all that?"
"Well we just don't want you using something that's easy."
"OK"
Later.
"You know what? I can't figure out what this computer likes. I tried windforge, millipedetight, huecircular, gougegrapple,
"Ok. Try something without words."
Several people have noted that people coming straight from school just don't know what it's like to work in the profession studied for. That smacks of a serious gap in education.
Schools can't cover every workplace situation but they may be not addressing core teaching on how to work. Surely it is less costly to inform students uniformly in a classroom rather than let them go haphazardly into whatever they can get into and then have them absorb at the whim of their bosses. Even the erratic behavior of business should be addressed in classroom theory.
People looking for work are typically asked about their experience, usually to screen out people who don't know basics about working in the profession. The basics are so basic though. I've written software for many different businesses - there are so many little things that would have just easily been acquired in class, but university seems to have the attitude that they can just present idealized problems without the counterpart of practical processes that have a direct influence on many people (responsibility), rules, business goals, business psychology, mistakes, getting things to work, etc.
A university degree though is still a status of being able to be employed, earning more than minimum wage and capable of learning the nuances of business towards a fulfilling career.
It seems so needless for graduates to have to learn something they could learn in school.
There are many articles in business computing journals and business journals that students can read on their own to see what it can be like in the workplace.
Assumption: Time exists.
Deduced: Paradoxes.
Conclusion: Time does not exist.
Time in the way we conceive it may be an incomplete model of reality.
For instance, we accept that light speed is the maximum yet we think the universe is expanding faster than light. This is treated as though a central time has been running at a constant pace while space expands - but what if it is time itself that is speeding up so that everything is going to its future state earlier? Locally, clocks would run at the same rate, but they would be actually falling behind the universe's time.
It's not implausible since clocks don't have to run at the same pace everywhere, as shown by relativity. Indeed there may even be more than one "clock" experienced by any single point - we can have a local "clock", and the universe can have a central "clock".
Destruction is fairly easy as entropy runs its course but energy and materials can be used to create some order and in some cases restore, or at the very least, replicate past states. Thus we can conceivably build worlds that existed before. Thus a clock can make a quantum leap backwards.
A resurrected world would find itself embedded in a place where many resources have been spent to build it though. If resources still exist, as entropy unbuilds the world, it may seek to rebuild.
Everything we see is history. Light took time to travel to us. If we can determine our past from light that bounced off us and then off something far away and came back, or was bent around a black hole and came back, we could construct a past situation and interact with it. Though the inhabitants of the situation would be told what year they are supposed to be in, they would be in two different times.
So if we look to our past would we see history as told or an artificial constructive process?
Plus, how cool is it going to be to download Windows Server 2006 (or whatever it is) off a P2P
Given the MS desire for maintaining market share, you will most likely be able to download an evaluation version. Netscape was always available in "beta" form - who really needed to pay for a web browser?
Caveat emptor - wouldn't MS be really scrutinizing traffic in their own little P2P? Not to see who is sharing MS products, not really, but to keep tabs on world wide trends, which will make it much easier to keep people looking for new software. Without new features, people are pretty happy with the status quo (is not Windows 2000 retaining popularity?)
But what new features will really send people to upgrade big time? Speed, quality, reliability, automation, ease, flexibility are all attractive characteristics. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It is because of the amazing popularity of Windows
Tangentially, billions of people really consider Windows to serve them well. MS may have rushed it to the market without finding all the security holes - so now we need hackers to find them but also to disclose their results rather than exploit them.
Users, beware. Make your backups and know how to recover. This is a good policy even if the OS is secure.
On top of this, we have to be careful computers that reference our personal information may be compromised. Chaos can reign unexpectedly.
holes
Beef consumption without fear!
No one really needs their own fab just for custom designs. Existing fabs can construct custom chips.
Very fast decryption machines indeed.
Oddly, not much in the news about decrypted information being used by the government in court or the like. A lot of evidence exists as database information, spreadsheets, e-mail, websites, source code, photos, etc. - all plaintext.
Foreign powers planning an attack may communicate in such short bursts followed so quickly by the actual attack that all the decryption in the world can't figure out what is going on. How can Bin Laden send so many people to flying school for years without any NSA red flagging? Because no one talks. Loose lips sink ships.
Now guess what?? The NSA is working on mind reading. They have to. It's technologically possible. But now that we know what the NSA is working on, they only have a couple of years lead at most, right? 2010 - mind readers are coming to Best Buy, Nintendo, etc. No more mouse and keyboard. DVORAK vs. QWERTY will be academic.
Is the NSA working on mind altering devices?? Free will must be preserved.
Well well well. It seems that there really is some intuition in the idea that mathematics cannot be purchased per unit like fruit in a grocery store.
Paying for mathematic research is definitely liable to result in quality mathematical ideas, but intuition about the intangibles:
A. We may hit a barrier that no real gain in mathematics can be obtained regardless of how much money is humanly available.
For instance, suppose computers become intelligent and perform mathematic discovery very quickly. In the limit all resources that can be spent on mathematics will be - a sort of barrier.
At any rate, the automatic discovery of mathematics is a kind of algorithm for mathematics, less than an ability to prove everything true with finite resources, but capable of proving everything that can be paid for along a finite set of thought lines.
There is the problem of being forced to choose and thus consume resources, on the assumption that even a quantum computer cannot consider all choices. But who knows? It may be possible for a computer to handle all elements of infinite sets, maybe even uncountable sets!! Mathematics and physical reality may have far more in common than what we can tell.
B. Mathematics per dollar - a genius might see a solution quickly while an organization spends billions going nowhere. Did Fermat really know a proof but the NSA could have (and may have) dumped untold money while Wiles put the pieces together all by himself.
C. The result belongs to the mathematician first. Perhaps the proof becomes obvious but if it isn't a mathematician funded by the NSA could foresee a wonderful conclusion and find a more lucrative buyer.
Ultimately the human race can purchase mathematics but the NSA is a tiny bit more limited.
i put FF on my sisters PC a while back
When I see FF, I think it means Fried Fish. There's a talk radio host named Scruff Connors who spells his name out. "... That's S-C-R-U-F-F as in Fried Fish" I think he retired or something, but he was pretty funny.
So when you started talking about fish in beer I know you put fried fish on your sister's computer.
The solution? Your toilet. Get the water out of the watertank. When it is lower then a certain level, it will refill. The toilet itself is perfect to get rid of water
Very well. The shower is even better for a water source. Start it on a drip and run that into a funnel. Because it is so high, no siphoning is required.
Further design ideas with flowing water. Use an IV bag full of cold water and let it slowly drip on your body, in the case a fan or electricity is not available. It must be questionable how much heat a fan can generate but they seem pretty efficient.
Sometimes I wonder how well water cooling really works when water just flows in a stream. If you blow hot room air into a cold shower will the bathroom get any colder? I suppose it's moot because the humidity will be a killer. Some air conditioners use cold water but they have numerous fins on the pipes in order to get massive surface area in contact with the air.
I wonder how much a car radiator costs - maybe no more than $50 just for a new one. Will it will rust while plain water goes through?
Patient people can fold a mega long copper tube into quite a space-filling array or use a large number of straight and T pieces to make such a contraption, which will have a large surface area.
A fan running on low is much more quiet and less energy consuming than an air conditioner. It's just a matter of whether comfort can be achieved at the sub $50 mark. Water based air conditioners can easily pump out 25000 BTU - there was one in a restaurant and it chilled the dining room quite fast. Get enough surface area on the pipes and you can make your living room pretty cold. Compressor-based refrigerators can go below the freezing point of water though. My food thermometer in the cold water tap never showed any temperature below 10 C although it reads 0 C for ice and 100 C for boiling water.
So if water might be put into a low-pressure chamber or bottle that allows water vapor to escape the room, the bottle could be used as a source of powerful cooling. Just not sure how to keep outside air from entering the bottle.
Not only this, if the freezer is in the same room as his "air conditioner" he is actually warming the room up by freezing the ice
I've seen a few perpetual motion rebuttals. But let me remind you of a couple of facts.
A. The cold water tap is a source of cold. The idea is to convert this source into cold air.
B. A freezer need not be in the same room. It could even be in the hot garage.
C. The room can be quite small so it won't take a lot of water to get a noticeable cooling. I tried the same thing once in a largish room and it didn't work because there was too much air. The air around the water cooled ok, and the water warmed up quickly but there was no comfort.
D. Air conditioners can be purchased for $100 or less. An extra $80 isn't a big deal in a first world country.
Still, the apparatus is useful in a situation where an air conditioner can't be easily mounted - these things are cubic and heavy, although surprisingly liftable once you are on your knees and your body is underneath. They really should have handles and perhaps telescopic legs.
If anyone is mounting an air conditioner into a wall/window, it can be lifted into place by this procedure: Get a large number of phone books from the phone company. They're free. Put machine on a board supported by a couple of phone books. Start low to the ground, as low as you can lift to. Add phone books to the left and right side to raise the unit without tipping it much until it is level with the place you are going to put it into. Now lift the machine up and in.
Common sense: if you are lifting to a high place you may need phone books in 4 corners and a wider board. Of course a project of this magnitude typically becomes tackled by a team whereas a water air cooler belongs in the realm of the individual, in which case everyone can just lift the machine into the opening.
I can say all of this after I lifted my air conditioner - from the side - along an aisle wide enough for just the machine into a hole in the wall. It was possible with one strategic knee motion and care not to impart acceleration in unfortunate directions. Just aim the centre of mass towards the opening and let inertia take over. Prior to this, adjust the body to be able to permit such motion without being dragged the wrong way by the machine. To avoid difficulties, practice swinging the machine a couple of degrees back and forth to know you can make the move while remaining stable. I wonder how much a car engine crane costs.
With all respect to university resource limitations, you would think they would be most proud of having their students attracting world attention, especially for something laudable.
Web pages for professors hardly get any news coverage, and these people are supposed to be at the top of the game. Surely research funding would leap to another quantum level if professors discussed on their websites how much impact or influence their research has, especially if those sites attracted page hits from large numbers of the public.
The adage of publish or perish seems to become perish and perish (i.e., lose, lose) when it comes to a little slashdotting.
If the management of Apple really wanted to try something revolutionary ... However, Apple management chose the evolutionary establishment-approved route: x86 ...
Prediction: Apple will say now look how well Windows runs!
See Ace Ventura: Pet Detective