Ah, someone with brains. If it still works, why would you change it (concerns about suitable replacement being timely aside as that's a separate issue).
BBC's were great for all sorts of things. Working in school IT departments I often find them, and sometimes I find "old" staff there who tell me how they used them for EEPROM reading/programming, and other interfacing that today's school machines hardly do any more with specialist adaptors.
They even ran the Teletext service in the UK (they actually have a "Teletext" video mode on them) and all sorts. It was a programmable, extendable computer that did what was necessary and no more.
Oh for those days again. Here's hoping that Raspberry Pi thing takes off.
The whole idea relies on the fact that this just doesn't happen often enough (most people just pay up and no challenge - hell, I know someone who paid ACS:Law for a similar accusation that they *swear* they didn't do).
The payoff on such things relies on the fact that it's free to make an accusation but extremely expensive to prove it or disprove it - and even if you can guarantee you're innocent ("The internet hasn't worked for 6 months here because the telecoms cable cut off all the island's Internet"), it's still time, money and hassle to take it through the courts and end up with a lousy apology and/or token pay-off.
But most people either a) know they did it or b) know they didn't do but can't be bothered to fight, which makes it profitable.
For sure, if I got one I'd be challenging it - especially now that the EU has said it's illegal to monitor my Internet connection for such activity, etc. (though, obviously, you could still be "caught" if their analysis of a remote system saw you doing whatever you weren't supposed to be doing, e.g. they subpoena a torrent host, etc.). I'd be very interested in where they got their information and although I probably wouldn't have the funds to drag them through the courts properly, I'd sure as hell fight and win if I was innocent.
It's people who don't understand the law, and don't want the hassle, or people that *know* what they did was illegal (does anyone really contest that the thing they're accused of is actually illegal? I bet not, it's just the nitty-gritty of how the companies prove that it was them rather the someone else that causes the problems).
If you didn't do it, reply with a standard letter (NOT any form they've sent you with options) and never deviate from your established line ("I didn't do it") until they either give up or take you to court properly. If they take you to court, turn up. That's about all you'd need if you genuinely didn't do it. If they don't take you to court, you've won by default. Chances are they wouldn't bother - the only cases I know of in the UK where it went to court were where people admitted they'd done it.
And if you did it? DON'T say you didn't. Pay up, negotiate, or find yourself a technically if you really must. Most people fall into the first category upon receiving such a letter, I imagine.
Being open to new facts doesn't stop the above UNTRUE facts being bollocks. You tell me that something else that I believe happens to be wrong (even one of those corrections) and I'll review it - my point was I'm not going to ARGUE it with you. Either they are true or they are not and either the data you present to support any change is true (and relevant, and accurate, etc. etc. etc.) or not. They are such simple questions that the answer is available without much interpretation of the data.
Either the Great Wall of China can be seen by the naked eye from the Moon, or it can't. And either the world flooded and some guy floated the ONLY boat to survive on it (while carrying millions of tons of animals, most microscopic or insectoid), or it didn't. Neither question is hard to answer definitively from the data available, so *arguing* over it is pointless.
Being open to challenges also doesn't mean I won't just ignore you in the course of ordinary human operation, or our scientists would never get any work done while they tried to explain to people that, no, antibiotics don't cure colds even if their granny swore by them.
My teachers at school PROMISED me that Bangkok was the capital of Thailand, that there were nine planets in the solar system, that the Earth has only one moon, that brides walk down the aisle of a church, that you could see the Great Wall of China from the Moon (which one?!), that Henry VIII had six wives, that nothing in English rhymed with silver, that chameleons change colour to match their background, that centipedes have 100 legs, that ostriches bury their heads in the sand, that fingernails continue to grow after death, that bananas come from trees, that Delilah cut Samson's hair, that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and a whole host of other junk that's just NOT TRUE.
It doesn't mean I stormed out of their lessons in disgust, or changed the way I think. It just meant that the parts I *did* know they were wrong on, I challenged them privately later or just ignored their own ignorance.
There are many ways to deal with people who you think are talking shite. The best one is to ignore them. To try to beat them with your own shite is just an infinite deadlock that you'll never resolve and just make yourself look stupid and childish. Ignore and carry on. Nobody will really care, either way.
I was taught, in the same way, that Noah took two of each animal onto the Ark - I don't believe there WAS an Ark, a Noah that did so, and the only historical record (which I do not see as at any more reliable than believing in Aesop's Fables) states 7 of each clean animal and 2 of each unclean animal at best.
Because it's religion, I would normally immediately call bullshit but I don't walk out of my RE lessons and get offended - if that's what you believe, fine. I think you're wrong, but that's your problem not mine and I don't really want to discuss the nitty-gritty with you unless you're being sensible about it (which means seeing my point of view as much as I do yours).
Religion is supposed to have a universally-accepted notion of tolerance. I don't think I've ever seen such intolerance as I do in religious groups (homosexuality, masturbation, belief in different things, etc. etc. etc.). If one of the most basic precepts of your faith isn't ever applied, then I see no reason to think that *ANY* of it is anything more than selective brainwashing. Also, when did you last eat pork, that meal that's specifically forbidden for most religions (including Christianity) to eat? And do you carry a little image of Jesus on a cross with you? Religion is one of the most hypocritical and self-contradictory things I've ever seen - but if you want to believe that, it's fine.
Nobody said they have to BELIEVE what the guy is saying, in the same way that I proved my teachers wrong on so many occasions it became a running joke. But to get offended at someone else's point of view (no matter how stubborn they are) is just a breeding ground for intolerance.
(All the above "facts" from my teacher were gleaned from a single series of the BBC's QI program - and all of them are utter bollocks and not true. You can argue if you want, but the fact is that I'll just ignore you.)
If you have internal resources that need to stay private, have a large IT budget, run many Apache servers in reverse proxy modes and one of your admins is STUPID enough to not only mis-write their regular expressions like this (even if it wasn't obvious to an amateur), but they also fail to keep up on the security lists that have been discussing this for weeks, ignore all the advice given and have to find out via Slashdot that they need to do something - you are REALLY employing the wrong IT people.
Seeing as the professor is "Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics", it would be likely that the course he teaches is genetically related, probably quite technical (i.e. not a run-of-the-mill basic course) and thus also suggested that these people's medical degrees / training include a genetic element.
As someone who lives with a qualified medical practitioner in a genetics field (most "doctors" who work for health services are actually PhD's, not General Practitioners - the doctors you go to see with a cough - working in medical labs around the world to analyse your test results so the GP can be told what you have), it would be incredibly unusual to suggest that a GP would require a thorough grounding in genetics so it would be assumed that either a) this is an extremely basic grounding in genetics aimed at the general practice or b) these students are, in some way, more in-depth (e.g. potential research scientists, lab workers, etc.). If the scenario is a), as mentioned above it's unlikely to be run by an Emeritus Professor who's so outspoken (the prof would be unlikely to be a controversial one, or be doing it for very long if he was), and it's unlikely that such a fuss would be caused and they would be able to skip the courses if it conflicted religiously .
In scenario b), they aren't going to be surgeons or GP's but they would work instead in labs combating the viruses you are talking about, running tests on your (and your virus's) DNA, formulating antidotes, etc. etc. There, it is extremely easy to argue, you have to have a thorough grounding in evolution and, most importantly, not be offended by it or only grasp it incompletely. That happens to be the job that my girlfriend does.
Apart from that, I wouldn't want to be treated by a doctor who skipped parts of medical school because they were offended by them - that only leads to madness where you end up with doctors who won't look at a woman's private parts, won't operate on certain religions, won't perform certain operations, object to circumcisions, etc. etc. etc. That's a slippery slope into hocus-pocus medicine rather than scientific medicine.
But then, my girlfriend once had students join her after they'd had several YEARS of medical school and honestly had them ask what a shoulder was, and some of them asserted that you could tell a man from a woman because one has less ribs (not true, if you didn't know, but comes directly from the Bible instead). These are the people who would, if they passed, be qualified to be performing forensic examinations, identifying your cancer, formulating treatments, testing drugs, tracing your family tree, fertilising your IVF, etc. That's a *scary* thought and if something on your medical course offends you, you can walk out and complain, sure, but you have to ask yourself why you were in the lecture in the first place.
You're seriously attending a lecture by a professor of genetics that's vital to your successful passing of a medical degree that will take YEARS and lots of money to finish, and you get offended by the suggestion of evolution? Then you probably should have thought that through beforehand.
No, but your transport costs would drop (one HUGE transaction compared to many little).
A smaller baker in the UK probably gets their ingredients from the local "cash and carry" that *DO* offer discounts for bulk, and very small bakers that have only small custom normally might well not buy enough to take advantage of even USING one of those places (whereas someone making 8500 orders probably WOULD).
Not *everything* would reduce prices in bulk but certainly there will almost always be a small saving in terms of economy along the way if you buying HUNDREDS of times more than your usual method (e.g. hiring a fecking van for the afternoon to get all the ingredients in one go rather than taking your normal car / whatever back and forth ten times). And if you can't find a discount in bulk, you really need to learn how to source your raw materials.
If you're not taking all that into account, per cake, when you make them and price them, then you're NOT doing business. You're playing at business. That's a sort of school-yard sale way of running a business - fine for entertainment and keeping you busy, worthless for a business that employs staff and has overheads.
And most of that stuff scales linearly or better (except possibly overtime, but then more staff would have counter-acted that presumably) - if the oven stays hot, it uses less gas per cake than if it keeps cooling, if you're making a thousand cakes you can bulk-buy the ingredients, etc. Worst that happens is some sort of physical limit (can't fit that many cakes in the oven, and not practical to buy a new oven for a one-off mistake) but she's already taking on extra staff to fulfil the orders so that's probably not the bottleneck.
Seriously, if you're not pricing your goods/services to make about 50% profit at least with EVERYTHING taken into account (i.e. down to the last pinch of sugar and kJ of gas), you're really not doing business so much as making a living for yourself (where profit is, basically, optional). In that case, you SHOULDN'T be using Groupon or even placing an advert without knowing that because you'll be expected to be a business when the new customers roll in.
The only problems I would see would be time (she's not complaining that she COULDN'T get them done in time, just that it was hard and she lost money), capacity (ovens, ingredients, working space, etc., none of which she really states as the reason she can't fulfil an order) and staff training (How long do you need to learn how to cook cupcakes en masse? A day? What effect does a production-line system where one person handles only one job have on your production that you couldn't do before?). But if you normally make a profit on the odd cupcake here and there, then you should make a LOT more profit on thousands of guaranteed orders with only the minimum of upheaval in comparison.
You can either whine about it, or get out in the van at 4am that day, bulk-buy the damn ingredients and draft in every relative and friend you have to help, and enjoy a percentage of 8,500 new, satisfied customers.
Unless, of course, you're really not that bright at this "making money" thing - and are stupid enough to give away a basically unlimited license to people to produce cake orders at a loss for yourself. I have about as much sympathy as I do when one of the big supermarkets has to cancel a special offer because they realise that customers can actually combine offers, take advantage, etc. and come out with profit at the store's expense. None.
Ignoring GroupOn (because the horror stories abound, and all of them are down to stupidity of these people when they deal with the GroupOn salesmen and sign the contract): If her CAKES were suddenly wonderful and popular overnight and people were queueing out the door for them (rather than just a special offer), she would have still made a loss. That's an idiotic way to run your business whether you ever expect it to happen or not. Every cake, promotional or not, should make a profit and NEVER a loss. Or your business is better off JUST NOT MAKING THEM even in small batches. If it doesn't scale, you're doing something wrong and failing to adjust to the situation - almost everything profitable scales nicely.
Is it just me that thinks that corporate influence has turned everyone into automated drones and actually feels quite relieved when the person on the other end of the line seems human? When you can joke about their products, when they curse the system in front of you, when they basically say "Yeah, but the guy who dealt with you before was an idiot, sorry." even if it's just with a gesture?
My boss regularly rings one of our suppliers for goods and they often chit-chat among themselves - he often works himself out a good discount while he's there, but that's how he operates - and it makes them seem altogether more understanding when you DO have a real problem rather than someone following a flowchart. They're also much more likely to get our custom than some robot who can't be made to smile, budge on price, or anything else that doesn't toe the company line EVEN IF they are more expensive than others.
I'm not sure if you've missed the point of the post entirely, which was stated in the first sentence, or got into a rant and went back to rantify it more afterwards. If you are a multi-million dollar establishment, I'm not suggesting you SHOULDN'T do dailies or anything else - because the cost of not outweighs the cost of. You're applying large enterprise IT to the world and that's exactly the point I make.
The drive to go with the tape you specify can cost more than some COMPLETE small business IT systems that I've seen. The point is: It all depends. Everyone would love to splash out $2k for a tape drive, 10 x $80 on tapes, etc. but not everywhere can and not everyone would see value in it depending on what their data is worth. Everyone would love to have an external dedicated server with Tb's of storage for rapid-restore off-site backups but that's not always feasible. It's *entirely* dependent on the value of the data, and the economies involved. Some places have no interest in *that* machine coming back up in a week, so long as *any* machine can come back up in a week with the data available from day one. There is no set "cost per byte" for everyone.
And you've failed to even GUESS at what the cost to the business is if one server can't be restored quickly. It might be zero. It might be billions. You want to apply the last value to everyone for everything which, if you worked in smaller establishments, would be laughed out of the room (by that criteria, we should all have multiply-redundant power supplies, double-UPS setup and a generator in the back for emergencies - fine for LOTS of place, not fine for the average small business where it would cost more than the business to do it properly). There are a million more small businesses out there who can operate without any computers at all than multi-billion-dollar companies that operate on millisecond timescales and five 9's.
And that's my point - you need to analyse what the data is worth so you can budget accordingly. There is no point spending $100 on data worth $100 if the cost for you to restore is $1000, no point only spending $500 if the data and downtime is worth millions, and no point spending $2800 if the data is worth $500 (and when your data is worth less, the cost of backup relative to it soon gets stupid).
"There is no backup system on Earth that can't restore to bigger disks."
You read the sentence wrong. If you implement a 100Gb backup system and then upgrade to a 200Gb RAID that you need to backup, was my point. That incurs an upgrade to > 200Gb of backup, which means new hardware, new quotas, new service costs, longer backup times, etc. etc. etc. Change management needs to be involved here.
"you back up both of them."
*IF* you know about them. That's the point. If your staff are just using their own home-bought drive because they're sick of access times across a VPN, say, then you need to know about that. Policy and people over technological solutions. Yeah, in an enterprise, unlikely. What about your small-town real estate agent that might do $1m of turnover every day or so?
"just blanket-backing-up is likely to lead to problems later on" -- no, it doesn't."
It is if you're ignorant. It means you haven't considered what you're backing up, what value it has, how important it is - you've just backed up everything. As a policy, it's mostly sound, but in human terms it leads to complacency and ignorance ("Oh, it doesn't matter that my laptop's died with files saved as a local user, we back up everything").
"notifying IT of new things that need to be backed up -- have you met humans? This never happens reliably, and can't ever be made reliable."
There I agree. But it's something that can completely destroy any sort of technical measure you put in place. And destroys your strategy whether you "back up everything" or not, thus is important for ALL people to take notice of.
"Back in the real world, a 100% complete backup of a typical Windows server can be
Surely it completely depends on the size of the company and the importance of the data?
Losing a week's work is *NOTHING* for a small business holder if they have all the normal records in order (it might only take an hour to bring them back up to date), but having a daily backup might actually be a huge chore for them if it involves swapping disks, wearing out tapes, has to be manually initiated, the servers are only on during the working day, etc. Losing a day's work for a 2000-employee company may be a bit more important but they have the resources to backup constantly if necessary.
Personally, if you don't know how important your data is, you have no idea just how often it's worth backing up or whether it's worth backing up at all or, indeed, what needs backing up. Many's the time I've been called into a workplace to restore their backup and they've discovered that the strategy that was fine two years ago was inadequate today because they weren't looking closely enough at what they needed to backup. And if you're not careful, things like "System State" backups can be almost entirely useless to you. Hell, even things like not backing up original install disks can lead to all sorts of problems (i.e. we had weird, obsolete program X that we can't purchase any more installed on the old server, but we can't find the install program to put it on the new server and can't transfer it across because of activation, lack of registry backups or other problems).
A blind "Let's just backup the whole server" isn't an effective backup strategy - it's just ignorance of the task at hand and one that's likely to lead to problems later (what if you upgrade to a larger disk, what if you bring in a new server, what if the server is slower than others and people start moving their data to something that gives them better performance, etc. etc.). Skimming through the thought process of backups by just blanket-backing-up is likely to lead to problems later on, but having an effective way of, say, notifying IT of new things that need to be backed up that people are familiar with and use regularly is worth its weight in gold.
Backup is something to give *extreme* thought to. You want every detail, down to being able to get back to where you are today from TOTALLY DIFFERENT bare metal, no matter what. If you put the thought in, then you are literally working out the costs of a daily vs weekly backup in terms of time, effort, media, storage quotas, etc. as a side-effect anyway and it won't ALWAYS work out in favour of daily backups - especially if you have multiple ways of recreating that data (if you're relying SOLELY on computers for that data, you might want to look at whether that's sensible, for instance, especially if you have 4+ years of record-keeping required by law).
A small company can recreate a week's work in a few days on top of normal work if necessary, and for the hundred-to-one chance of it happening that might well be cost-effective compared to having to up their quotas, keep many more backups (7 times more, or have to cut their possible-history by 1/7th for the same price), change tapes, tie up the servers, etc. A weekend backup would not be unusual at all for a small business.
It also depends very much on the cost of recreating your data. As an IT guy, you can blindly say "We just have to put all our money into backups" but from a business point of view, that's not necessarily cost-effective even if you assume worst-case-scenarios. I'd much rather put more money into regularly working out WHAT needs to be backed up and doing so once a week than being forever complacent and backing up every day. Worst case, you lose a week's work. Same as if there was a flood, or a riot, or a problem with the building, or (in some industries / countries) a holiday, etc.
I specialise in working for schools - bringing back the ones that have slipped into trouble so they are working again - and I see some god-awful messes that I have to clear up. Daily backups don't always save you, especi
I think the REAL problem is that even the smallest brains have several billion neurons, with each having 10's of thousands of connections to other neurons. This chip simulates ONE such connection.
That's a PCB-routing problem that you REALLY don't want, and way outside the scale of anything that we build (it's like every computer on the planet having 10,000 direct Ethernet connections to nearby computers - no switches, hubs, routers, etc. in order to simulate something approaching a small mouse's brain - not only a cabling and routing nightmare but where the hell do you plug it all in?). Not only that, by a real brain learns by breaking and creating connections all the time.
The analog nature of the neuron isn't really the key to making "artificial brains" - the problem is simply scale. We will never be able to produce enough of these chips and tie them together well enough to produce anything conventionally interesting (and certainly nothing that we could actually analyse any better than the brain of any other species). If we did, it would be unmanageably unprogrammable and unpredictable. If it did anything interesting on its own, we'd never understand how or why it did that.
And I think the claim that they know EVERYTHING about how a neuron works (at least one part of it) is optimistic at best.
Ah, these people who've never played a game where you only have keyboard controls because menuing systems didn't exist or were resource intensive. How's your Playstation that my generation invented for you?
If you're really *that* bad, play one of the many GUI's for the base game. But your ADOM would never have existed if NetHack hadn't been around nearly TEN YEARS before it came out, before Windows had even hit version 2.0 and got proper windowing support.
Those of us who grew up with "redefine keys" options have almost zero problems with memorising the 3-4 vital buttons that play 99% of the game and having many other options available at the press of a button if they need them.
Even something as silly as Nethack has almost infinite replayability, and that's why it's popular. (It doesn't mean that making games replayable will instantly make them hits, but it's certainly a large factor).
I've realised, though, that no matter what games I emulate from my "golden" period of gaming, that I quickly get bored of them and move onto other games, except for a certain handful that you *can* just keep playing over and over again even if you've played them for 20 years on-and-off.
Modern games rely on things like multiplayer options to provide their replayability but that relies on people *wanting* to play it online to the extent that they setup / buy / manage servers / games for it. Multiplayer really was the death of creativity in videogames.
The problem is that games authors don't match replayability with making money. If someone can only reasonably play a game once or twice before they get bored / stop having fun, then they'll go and buy another - maybe a sequel - instead. It's not directly profitable to make a game replayable. It's a rare instance where a replayable game can just make that amount of money overnight because of people "rewarding" them, effectively, for making such an enjoyable bit of gameplay - few others will enjoy that success even if their game is better AND more replayable.
I judge my Steam purchases by hours of gameplay per pound (about $1.50). Anything over 10 hours per pound is usually pretty good. Some games are in the hundreds of hours per pound. Most half-decent games manage at least 1 hour per pound. Anything below that I consider a loss. So the game has to be either amazing and long (rare - HL2 managed it), or it has to be cheap, or it has to be very replayable.
How many games, when you replay, do you end up doing the same things, talking to the same characters, hitting the same buttons, being "ambushed" at the same points, etc.? (I tired of Magicka very quickly because of that (and because of their stupid save system).
How many have a formula - "press this button, then hide on that platform and shoot until everything's dead" - that, once you work it out, you can follow and be pretty certain of constantly making progress? Even HL2 is guilty of both problems and thus why I've never really replayed it.
But silly things like Minecraft, Nethack (and spin-offs like Dungeons of Dredmor), Elite and a thousand other games are replayable enough that even if you *DID* make it through and complete the game, you could go back for more and it would be different. For HL2 you'd still be subject to the same cutscenes, the same forced route, the same decisions, etc.
It's not just an "open-plan" game like the Grand Theft Autos - you still have to do the same mash of missions in the same time in the same way doing the same things in those even if you have choice of which one to do when - but a replayable game. Replayable games can even be quite repetitive at times, but they don't stop being fun to play because it "feels" different - like you've acclimatised to how the world works but it's still a new world each time with its own challenges.
Big-name games don't have the same replayability that they used to - it's definitely followed the indie genre more than the commercial publishers. Sequel after sequel after sequel don't make something more replayable - it's like the difference between being given three "one night" game rentals, and being given three games. With modern games, you'd hardly notice the difference because you'll never load them again, but with the best games, you'd much rather pay more and own them forever and get to play them as much as you'd like.
As someone who's racked up over 500 hours on Altitude, 100 hours on Dungeons of Dredmor, 1000's of hours on Counterstrike, it's disappointing that most of what make them great is missing from commercial games that people queue outside stores for, see advertised on TV, etc.
Replayability is the key. If I don't get an hour per pou
I have a mental checklist of things I notice about people when I meet them.
Almost without fail, those who openly and spontaneously profess a love for their country are those who don't actually realise (or won't admit) it's failings and are part of the cause of those failings. "America is the best country in the world" is a typical example that I often hear.
But those who openly and spontaneously put their own country down actually care about it enough to do so and "love" their country more.
Personally, I detest some of the things that my country has done (not least, following America into a fake "war") - I think they are abhorrent and reckless and thoughtless - but I detest them because I'm *disappointed* that it was my country that did them.
Literally, my country should be better than that. We aren't, because we did them, but we should be. And it's because I care about what my country does to its own people, people in other countries, its reputation, etc. that I am more likely to tell people the things we did wrong rather than the things we do right (How many Brits know about the Singapore pull-out in WW2? How many Americans realise how the UK treated the Ghurka despite what they've done for us?)
The UK isn't "free" (because I don't think there can be such a thing) but we are certainly "freer" than a lot of other places and yet I still point out all the stupid restrictions we have at every opportunity because I want my country to be *better*. It seems to me that a lot of the Americans I meet think their country is already "the best" and "free" and so they don't strive to better their country and its image in other countries. Everybody should just love them because they are the best (and if you watch the movie Love Actually, you'll see a very contrived but incredibly accurate depiction of how the US treats the UK politically and what our response SHOULD be).
It's like the difference between "We did what we thought was best" and "We should never have done that". Both statements may even refer to the same incident, but one attitude is superior, the other a lesson to learn from, and either tells you a hell of a lot about the people who say them.
It's partly because, of course, the Europeans are a number of otherwise independent states so it's like a democracy on an international scale - chances are that SOMEONE will kick up a fuss about something that they disagree with and concessions will have to be made (e.g. the UK still isn't in the Euro for various reasons, Germany doesn't want to be involved in more Greek bailouts etc.).
When you have internal opposition on the scale of national governments, it's a bit more even and controlled than when you have only internal opposition that consists of singular people (who, history has shown, can be corrupt, swayed or just chosen so that they are all of a certain age / mindset).
That said, I've never seen a country less free than America. The only sad fact is that they don't notice it. At least the Chinese KNOW where they are (whether they care or not is another matter) but the US just don't seem to understand what they are doing to themselves and what they are letting slip under their noses. So long as they have their guns and their god, they seem perfectly happy to let a multitude of sins pass through with their approval. Hell, they were close to getting national healthcare and they managed to balls that up too.
And the Americans I've spoken to in person just don't get this... they don't understand that, actually, the stereotype of an American that doesn't know or cares what happens beyond its borders is a little more than just a stereotype. They don't care that, even today, their government imprisons and (still probably) tortures people who haven't gone on trial by doing it on foreign soil. That's "freedom" to them, because it's applied to a different type of person - non-Americans. Try to move on a guy from sitting on Wall Street, though, and it makes the news for days on end. When they show the Olympics you only see Americans winning and *NOTHING* else.
America has many problems, like just about every other country in the world, but it's like those countries that call themselves The Democratic Republic Of, or the People's Republic Of, etc. They are anything but. Land of the Free? Yeah, Land of the Free so long as you stay within our borders, have enough money for healthcare, and never ask for anything we don't want to give you.
I still have an original EPIA board that's still running after MANY years of use in a school, then used as a project-kit for myself (it outlived the school's age at which they replace). Never once witnessed a crash on it in its entire life (it's currently booting Linux 2.4 off a CF card, I think - been so long since I needed to fiddle, I don't even remember).
Just what the hell do you do to destroy a low-power CPU in an embedded device and not take the motherboard with it?
-- Someone who's managed many thousands of machines over the last 15 years and NEVER, repeat NEVER, had to replace a CPU on its own (whether for faults or upgrades). I can count the instances I've had to change a motherboard on my fingers, too, and mostly because of crappy capacitors and faulty external ports. And every time, it was age that killed it and it wasn't anywhere near practical to source a replacement board that took the same CPU vs just buying something twice as powerful for the same price.
Almost every laptop in the world has a built-in CPU that's almost impossible to change and nobody seems to suffer from that. Personally, I find the whole socket idea ridiculous and think *everything* should be like the Mini-ITX - rarely is there an opportunity where you deliberately *don't* buy the top-of-the-range CPU that will fit on a particular motherboard and then later, when you do want to upgrade, you upgrade JUST the CPU on its own (if there's even a compatible one still being produced by then!).
My first PC (a 386 with 1Mb) had a case that literally opened at the touch of a button and lifted up on gas-struts so you could fiddle inside because you had to all the time. The last 5 years, I've just got a huge pile of expansion cards and RAM modules salvaged from old PC's and stock that I've never once had the chance to use to upgrade or revive a machine. I honestly can't remember the last time I fitted an expansion card of any time but think it may have been a PCI card. The last time I put a CPU in a socket? About 8 years ago when a 5-year-old PC managed to completely dry-out its heatsink compound and it needed reapplying (and ran for another 4 years without any problems).
Socketed CPU's aren't a problem that needs solving any more, and when you do want to upgrade it'll be cheaper to buy a whole new board + CPU with the latest redesign of the damn socket anyway. Hell, I've specified 100's or 1000's of pounds of equipment over the last few years and never once considered (or really cared) what socket anything used - it's just not necessary.
Paint your car-tyres with it and you'll never have to clean them again and they'll wear much more slowly and give you a boost in fuel economy due to reduce friction!
If style issues bother you, run your code through a styler before and after you receive them from your source-code management system.
Really, style and content in C are as separate as they are in HTML and CSS. If you want a certain way of spacing things, generate a rule that turns everything into your style before you see it and converts back to whatever the agreed style is before you publish it for others. It really makes no difference to the compiler, only the programmer. And the programmer that can't even set up a simple code-styler is the one who should be shot or (more likely) sacked.
My Eclipse C IDE setup is perfectly set to the settings that I want and use. Other people hate it. I like my loop braces on completely independent lines (so if and condition are on line 1, loop brace on line 2, loop content on the next few lines, loop brace on next line, else statement - possibly with condition on next line, loop brace on next line, "else" content and then loop brace on a final line), I use the double-slash comment syntax for multi-line comments (and reserve the star-slash syntax for when I'm commenting out a block of code), I tab indent everything but it's really a four-space indent each time, I enclose each case blocks in switches statements with curly-quotes, I like spaces in between every function parameter and even either side of any assignment-equals, and a million and one other "crimes" that some people don't like. My code is still C99, though, and takes seconds to reapply formatting style to whatever you want if you have a decent IDE or SCM.
Personally, I always keep the * with the variable - because that is what it applies to. It's nothing to do with the int, that's just the contents of it (you "read" pointers from right to left - int * is a pointer to an int, int ** is a pointer to a pointer to an int), but the fact it's a pointer is a million times more important not to get confused (and as the poster above explains, it's easy to do). Yes, your compiler should catch most stupidity but relying on your compiler to spot your stupidity is stupidity in itself.
As soon as you start getting into double-pointers (**), then you generate a world of hurt for yourself by trying to keep them with the type. I always think of pointers as *entirely* different things to variables because you can have a pointer to a range of different types beyond the built-in types, but something is either a pointer, or not a pointer and changing it requires a particular keyword (& or *). The * is a special indicator of this unique property and should follow the variable, not the type.
I also prefer:
void *function_name(int parameter)
even though:
void* function_name(int parameter)
is perfectly legal. Strangely, I see a lot of programmers who write variable pointers differently to functions that return a pointer, etc. And don't even get me started on what happens when you have a function pointer to a function that returns a pointer of some kind (which I most commonly hit when loading DLL's dynamically and trying not to stomp over declarations in the library header files that would require linking the static library to work without interfering). There's all sorts of hideous choices that can be made there.
Any foodstuff with a nationality in it's name will never have been heard of by people within that nation.
English muffin. Someone once tried to tell me about "English cucumbers" (which apparently have no skin - what the hell?). The French call custard "Creme Anglais", etc. Italians have an ice cream called Zuppa Inglese (when we've never had any such thing).
None of which you'll EVER find in an English restaurant at all.
"buying the recorded music unit of EMI for $1.9 billion"
"It's expected that a consortium led by Sony will soon purchase EMI's publishing unit for upwards of $2 billion."
"company executives believe they can persuade regulators to allow it to swallow the business whole because the music industry is in such decline."
1.9bn for a single (apparently struggling) company. Wow. Wish my company was in such decline. Strange that an industry can decline while those producing the devices that music plays are and those selling music (albeit online now rather than physical) are at their most popular and profitable in the entire history of music.
Hell, those idiots only started counting digital sales in the UK Top 10 just about a year ago. In denial much?
1) Windows was free for me. My employer paid for it. It's "only" XP (but has a 7 install disk if I could be bothered) but it's more than good enough for everything I want to do.
2) Most Steam games run on Windows and not on Linux.
3) That's about it.
There's nothing work-wise I can't do on Linux and OS-alternatives, there's nothing home-wise that I'd find more convenient on Windows except games. Hell, I still pine for K3B's interface and make-do with CDBurnerXP Pro instead.
And those games are my "Right, I'll double-click, get thrown into another world for half-hour, and escape the tedium of software development / PC management / fiddling with options for a while" so there's no real joy in going through the effort of *making* them work on Linux or playing with options to make them work better. They are literally my one-click escape from having to DO things like that for a living.
I've actually done it and transferred my usual desktop applications (which are all cross-platform) and to a Linux machine and been able to work and do home stuff with no problems whatsoever for years at a time. It's there. It's free. It works just as good.
The only thing "keeping" me on Windows is Steam. Take my Windows licence off me tomorrow and that's the only thing that would suffer until I could get around to setting it up. I really wouldn't notice anything else.
Hell, when I do some programming, I have cross-platform programs that do little else but replicate a Linux-like environment on Windows so I can actually get things done (Eclipse, GCC, MinGW, etc.).
The trouble is, my investment in Windows-only games in much higher than my investment in anything else, and I can do "anything else" on any OS at all. It's only the games that NEED Windows and everything else happily works under Windows, so it makes more sense to use Windows generally (so long as you're not paying for it).
If I didn't have my games, a Linux machine has always and will always serve me just as well for everything else. In my opinion, Linux has arrived and done what it promised on the desktop. If I were a millionaire tomorrow and needed to kit out a company, it would be Linux all the way. The only "problem" is that games programmed to be Windows-only don't work perfectly and immediately and at the same performance level on a reliable basis (i.e. I can't guarantee they will run when I first install them) on Linux, which is hardly a fault in Linux at all.
It's like blaming MS that I can't run some old Linux-binary version of TuxRacer on it. Sure, I could recompile, but I want ONLY THAT BINARY to work. That's the problem with games - not made to be cross-platform.
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Ah, someone with brains. If it still works, why would you change it (concerns about suitable replacement being timely aside as that's a separate issue).
BBC's were great for all sorts of things. Working in school IT departments I often find them, and sometimes I find "old" staff there who tell me how they used them for EEPROM reading/programming, and other interfacing that today's school machines hardly do any more with specialist adaptors.
They even ran the Teletext service in the UK (they actually have a "Teletext" video mode on them) and all sorts. It was a programmable, extendable computer that did what was necessary and no more.
Oh for those days again. Here's hoping that Raspberry Pi thing takes off.
The EU already doesn't allow software patents anyway (and those it has allowed are unenforceable).
The whole idea relies on the fact that this just doesn't happen often enough (most people just pay up and no challenge - hell, I know someone who paid ACS:Law for a similar accusation that they *swear* they didn't do).
The payoff on such things relies on the fact that it's free to make an accusation but extremely expensive to prove it or disprove it - and even if you can guarantee you're innocent ("The internet hasn't worked for 6 months here because the telecoms cable cut off all the island's Internet"), it's still time, money and hassle to take it through the courts and end up with a lousy apology and/or token pay-off.
But most people either a) know they did it or b) know they didn't do but can't be bothered to fight, which makes it profitable.
For sure, if I got one I'd be challenging it - especially now that the EU has said it's illegal to monitor my Internet connection for such activity, etc. (though, obviously, you could still be "caught" if their analysis of a remote system saw you doing whatever you weren't supposed to be doing, e.g. they subpoena a torrent host, etc.). I'd be very interested in where they got their information and although I probably wouldn't have the funds to drag them through the courts properly, I'd sure as hell fight and win if I was innocent.
It's people who don't understand the law, and don't want the hassle, or people that *know* what they did was illegal (does anyone really contest that the thing they're accused of is actually illegal? I bet not, it's just the nitty-gritty of how the companies prove that it was them rather the someone else that causes the problems).
If you didn't do it, reply with a standard letter (NOT any form they've sent you with options) and never deviate from your established line ("I didn't do it") until they either give up or take you to court properly. If they take you to court, turn up. That's about all you'd need if you genuinely didn't do it. If they don't take you to court, you've won by default. Chances are they wouldn't bother - the only cases I know of in the UK where it went to court were where people admitted they'd done it.
And if you did it? DON'T say you didn't. Pay up, negotiate, or find yourself a technically if you really must. Most people fall into the first category upon receiving such a letter, I imagine.
Being open to new facts doesn't stop the above UNTRUE facts being bollocks. You tell me that something else that I believe happens to be wrong (even one of those corrections) and I'll review it - my point was I'm not going to ARGUE it with you. Either they are true or they are not and either the data you present to support any change is true (and relevant, and accurate, etc. etc. etc.) or not. They are such simple questions that the answer is available without much interpretation of the data.
Either the Great Wall of China can be seen by the naked eye from the Moon, or it can't. And either the world flooded and some guy floated the ONLY boat to survive on it (while carrying millions of tons of animals, most microscopic or insectoid), or it didn't. Neither question is hard to answer definitively from the data available, so *arguing* over it is pointless.
Being open to challenges also doesn't mean I won't just ignore you in the course of ordinary human operation, or our scientists would never get any work done while they tried to explain to people that, no, antibiotics don't cure colds even if their granny swore by them.
My teachers at school PROMISED me that Bangkok was the capital of Thailand, that there were nine planets in the solar system, that the Earth has only one moon, that brides walk down the aisle of a church, that you could see the Great Wall of China from the Moon (which one?!), that Henry VIII had six wives, that nothing in English rhymed with silver, that chameleons change colour to match their background, that centipedes have 100 legs, that ostriches bury their heads in the sand, that fingernails continue to grow after death, that bananas come from trees, that Delilah cut Samson's hair, that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and a whole host of other junk that's just NOT TRUE.
It doesn't mean I stormed out of their lessons in disgust, or changed the way I think. It just meant that the parts I *did* know they were wrong on, I challenged them privately later or just ignored their own ignorance.
There are many ways to deal with people who you think are talking shite. The best one is to ignore them. To try to beat them with your own shite is just an infinite deadlock that you'll never resolve and just make yourself look stupid and childish. Ignore and carry on. Nobody will really care, either way.
I was taught, in the same way, that Noah took two of each animal onto the Ark - I don't believe there WAS an Ark, a Noah that did so, and the only historical record (which I do not see as at any more reliable than believing in Aesop's Fables) states 7 of each clean animal and 2 of each unclean animal at best.
Because it's religion, I would normally immediately call bullshit but I don't walk out of my RE lessons and get offended - if that's what you believe, fine. I think you're wrong, but that's your problem not mine and I don't really want to discuss the nitty-gritty with you unless you're being sensible about it (which means seeing my point of view as much as I do yours).
Religion is supposed to have a universally-accepted notion of tolerance. I don't think I've ever seen such intolerance as I do in religious groups (homosexuality, masturbation, belief in different things, etc. etc. etc.). If one of the most basic precepts of your faith isn't ever applied, then I see no reason to think that *ANY* of it is anything more than selective brainwashing. Also, when did you last eat pork, that meal that's specifically forbidden for most religions (including Christianity) to eat? And do you carry a little image of Jesus on a cross with you? Religion is one of the most hypocritical and self-contradictory things I've ever seen - but if you want to believe that, it's fine.
Nobody said they have to BELIEVE what the guy is saying, in the same way that I proved my teachers wrong on so many occasions it became a running joke. But to get offended at someone else's point of view (no matter how stubborn they are) is just a breeding ground for intolerance.
(All the above "facts" from my teacher were gleaned from a single series of the BBC's QI program - and all of them are utter bollocks and not true. You can argue if you want, but the fact is that I'll just ignore you.)
If you have internal resources that need to stay private, have a large IT budget, run many Apache servers in reverse proxy modes and one of your admins is STUPID enough to not only mis-write their regular expressions like this (even if it wasn't obvious to an amateur), but they also fail to keep up on the security lists that have been discussing this for weeks, ignore all the advice given and have to find out via Slashdot that they need to do something - you are REALLY employing the wrong IT people.
Everyone else? It doesn't actually affect them.
Seeing as the professor is "Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics", it would be likely that the course he teaches is genetically related, probably quite technical (i.e. not a run-of-the-mill basic course) and thus also suggested that these people's medical degrees / training include a genetic element.
As someone who lives with a qualified medical practitioner in a genetics field (most "doctors" who work for health services are actually PhD's, not General Practitioners - the doctors you go to see with a cough - working in medical labs around the world to analyse your test results so the GP can be told what you have), it would be incredibly unusual to suggest that a GP would require a thorough grounding in genetics so it would be assumed that either a) this is an extremely basic grounding in genetics aimed at the general practice or b) these students are, in some way, more in-depth (e.g. potential research scientists, lab workers, etc.). If the scenario is a), as mentioned above it's unlikely to be run by an Emeritus Professor who's so outspoken (the prof would be unlikely to be a controversial one, or be doing it for very long if he was), and it's unlikely that such a fuss would be caused and they would be able to skip the courses if it conflicted religiously .
In scenario b), they aren't going to be surgeons or GP's but they would work instead in labs combating the viruses you are talking about, running tests on your (and your virus's) DNA, formulating antidotes, etc. etc. There, it is extremely easy to argue, you have to have a thorough grounding in evolution and, most importantly, not be offended by it or only grasp it incompletely. That happens to be the job that my girlfriend does.
Apart from that, I wouldn't want to be treated by a doctor who skipped parts of medical school because they were offended by them - that only leads to madness where you end up with doctors who won't look at a woman's private parts, won't operate on certain religions, won't perform certain operations, object to circumcisions, etc. etc. etc. That's a slippery slope into hocus-pocus medicine rather than scientific medicine.
But then, my girlfriend once had students join her after they'd had several YEARS of medical school and honestly had them ask what a shoulder was, and some of them asserted that you could tell a man from a woman because one has less ribs (not true, if you didn't know, but comes directly from the Bible instead). These are the people who would, if they passed, be qualified to be performing forensic examinations, identifying your cancer, formulating treatments, testing drugs, tracing your family tree, fertilising your IVF, etc. That's a *scary* thought and if something on your medical course offends you, you can walk out and complain, sure, but you have to ask yourself why you were in the lecture in the first place.
You're seriously attending a lecture by a professor of genetics that's vital to your successful passing of a medical degree that will take YEARS and lots of money to finish, and you get offended by the suggestion of evolution? Then you probably should have thought that through beforehand.
No, but your transport costs would drop (one HUGE transaction compared to many little).
A smaller baker in the UK probably gets their ingredients from the local "cash and carry" that *DO* offer discounts for bulk, and very small bakers that have only small custom normally might well not buy enough to take advantage of even USING one of those places (whereas someone making 8500 orders probably WOULD).
Not *everything* would reduce prices in bulk but certainly there will almost always be a small saving in terms of economy along the way if you buying HUNDREDS of times more than your usual method (e.g. hiring a fecking van for the afternoon to get all the ingredients in one go rather than taking your normal car / whatever back and forth ten times). And if you can't find a discount in bulk, you really need to learn how to source your raw materials.
If you're not taking all that into account, per cake, when you make them and price them, then you're NOT doing business. You're playing at business. That's a sort of school-yard sale way of running a business - fine for entertainment and keeping you busy, worthless for a business that employs staff and has overheads.
And most of that stuff scales linearly or better (except possibly overtime, but then more staff would have counter-acted that presumably) - if the oven stays hot, it uses less gas per cake than if it keeps cooling, if you're making a thousand cakes you can bulk-buy the ingredients, etc. Worst that happens is some sort of physical limit (can't fit that many cakes in the oven, and not practical to buy a new oven for a one-off mistake) but she's already taking on extra staff to fulfil the orders so that's probably not the bottleneck.
Seriously, if you're not pricing your goods/services to make about 50% profit at least with EVERYTHING taken into account (i.e. down to the last pinch of sugar and kJ of gas), you're really not doing business so much as making a living for yourself (where profit is, basically, optional). In that case, you SHOULDN'T be using Groupon or even placing an advert without knowing that because you'll be expected to be a business when the new customers roll in.
The only problems I would see would be time (she's not complaining that she COULDN'T get them done in time, just that it was hard and she lost money), capacity (ovens, ingredients, working space, etc., none of which she really states as the reason she can't fulfil an order) and staff training (How long do you need to learn how to cook cupcakes en masse? A day? What effect does a production-line system where one person handles only one job have on your production that you couldn't do before?). But if you normally make a profit on the odd cupcake here and there, then you should make a LOT more profit on thousands of guaranteed orders with only the minimum of upheaval in comparison.
You can either whine about it, or get out in the van at 4am that day, bulk-buy the damn ingredients and draft in every relative and friend you have to help, and enjoy a percentage of 8,500 new, satisfied customers.
Unless, of course, you're really not that bright at this "making money" thing - and are stupid enough to give away a basically unlimited license to people to produce cake orders at a loss for yourself. I have about as much sympathy as I do when one of the big supermarkets has to cancel a special offer because they realise that customers can actually combine offers, take advantage, etc. and come out with profit at the store's expense. None.
Ignoring GroupOn (because the horror stories abound, and all of them are down to stupidity of these people when they deal with the GroupOn salesmen and sign the contract): If her CAKES were suddenly wonderful and popular overnight and people were queueing out the door for them (rather than just a special offer), she would have still made a loss. That's an idiotic way to run your business whether you ever expect it to happen or not. Every cake, promotional or not, should make a profit and NEVER a loss. Or your business is better off JUST NOT MAKING THEM even in small batches. If it doesn't scale, you're doing something wrong and failing to adjust to the situation - almost everything profitable scales nicely.
Is it just me that thinks that corporate influence has turned everyone into automated drones and actually feels quite relieved when the person on the other end of the line seems human? When you can joke about their products, when they curse the system in front of you, when they basically say "Yeah, but the guy who dealt with you before was an idiot, sorry." even if it's just with a gesture?
My boss regularly rings one of our suppliers for goods and they often chit-chat among themselves - he often works himself out a good discount while he's there, but that's how he operates - and it makes them seem altogether more understanding when you DO have a real problem rather than someone following a flowchart. They're also much more likely to get our custom than some robot who can't be made to smile, budge on price, or anything else that doesn't toe the company line EVEN IF they are more expensive than others.
I'm not sure if you've missed the point of the post entirely, which was stated in the first sentence, or got into a rant and went back to rantify it more afterwards. If you are a multi-million dollar establishment, I'm not suggesting you SHOULDN'T do dailies or anything else - because the cost of not outweighs the cost of. You're applying large enterprise IT to the world and that's exactly the point I make.
The drive to go with the tape you specify can cost more than some COMPLETE small business IT systems that I've seen. The point is: It all depends. Everyone would love to splash out $2k for a tape drive, 10 x $80 on tapes, etc. but not everywhere can and not everyone would see value in it depending on what their data is worth. Everyone would love to have an external dedicated server with Tb's of storage for rapid-restore off-site backups but that's not always feasible. It's *entirely* dependent on the value of the data, and the economies involved. Some places have no interest in *that* machine coming back up in a week, so long as *any* machine can come back up in a week with the data available from day one. There is no set "cost per byte" for everyone.
And you've failed to even GUESS at what the cost to the business is if one server can't be restored quickly. It might be zero. It might be billions. You want to apply the last value to everyone for everything which, if you worked in smaller establishments, would be laughed out of the room (by that criteria, we should all have multiply-redundant power supplies, double-UPS setup and a generator in the back for emergencies - fine for LOTS of place, not fine for the average small business where it would cost more than the business to do it properly). There are a million more small businesses out there who can operate without any computers at all than multi-billion-dollar companies that operate on millisecond timescales and five 9's.
And that's my point - you need to analyse what the data is worth so you can budget accordingly. There is no point spending $100 on data worth $100 if the cost for you to restore is $1000, no point only spending $500 if the data and downtime is worth millions, and no point spending $2800 if the data is worth $500 (and when your data is worth less, the cost of backup relative to it soon gets stupid).
"There is no backup system on Earth that can't restore to bigger disks."
You read the sentence wrong. If you implement a 100Gb backup system and then upgrade to a 200Gb RAID that you need to backup, was my point. That incurs an upgrade to > 200Gb of backup, which means new hardware, new quotas, new service costs, longer backup times, etc. etc. etc. Change management needs to be involved here.
"you back up both of them."
*IF* you know about them. That's the point. If your staff are just using their own home-bought drive because they're sick of access times across a VPN, say, then you need to know about that. Policy and people over technological solutions. Yeah, in an enterprise, unlikely. What about your small-town real estate agent that might do $1m of turnover every day or so?
"just blanket-backing-up is likely to lead to problems later on" -- no, it doesn't."
It is if you're ignorant. It means you haven't considered what you're backing up, what value it has, how important it is - you've just backed up everything. As a policy, it's mostly sound, but in human terms it leads to complacency and ignorance ("Oh, it doesn't matter that my laptop's died with files saved as a local user, we back up everything").
"notifying IT of new things that need to be backed up -- have you met humans? This never happens reliably, and can't ever be made reliable."
There I agree. But it's something that can completely destroy any sort of technical measure you put in place. And destroys your strategy whether you "back up everything" or not, thus is important for ALL people to take notice of.
"Back in the real world, a 100% complete backup of a typical Windows server can be
Surely it completely depends on the size of the company and the importance of the data?
Losing a week's work is *NOTHING* for a small business holder if they have all the normal records in order (it might only take an hour to bring them back up to date), but having a daily backup might actually be a huge chore for them if it involves swapping disks, wearing out tapes, has to be manually initiated, the servers are only on during the working day, etc. Losing a day's work for a 2000-employee company may be a bit more important but they have the resources to backup constantly if necessary.
Personally, if you don't know how important your data is, you have no idea just how often it's worth backing up or whether it's worth backing up at all or, indeed, what needs backing up. Many's the time I've been called into a workplace to restore their backup and they've discovered that the strategy that was fine two years ago was inadequate today because they weren't looking closely enough at what they needed to backup. And if you're not careful, things like "System State" backups can be almost entirely useless to you. Hell, even things like not backing up original install disks can lead to all sorts of problems (i.e. we had weird, obsolete program X that we can't purchase any more installed on the old server, but we can't find the install program to put it on the new server and can't transfer it across because of activation, lack of registry backups or other problems).
A blind "Let's just backup the whole server" isn't an effective backup strategy - it's just ignorance of the task at hand and one that's likely to lead to problems later (what if you upgrade to a larger disk, what if you bring in a new server, what if the server is slower than others and people start moving their data to something that gives them better performance, etc. etc.). Skimming through the thought process of backups by just blanket-backing-up is likely to lead to problems later on, but having an effective way of, say, notifying IT of new things that need to be backed up that people are familiar with and use regularly is worth its weight in gold.
Backup is something to give *extreme* thought to. You want every detail, down to being able to get back to where you are today from TOTALLY DIFFERENT bare metal, no matter what. If you put the thought in, then you are literally working out the costs of a daily vs weekly backup in terms of time, effort, media, storage quotas, etc. as a side-effect anyway and it won't ALWAYS work out in favour of daily backups - especially if you have multiple ways of recreating that data (if you're relying SOLELY on computers for that data, you might want to look at whether that's sensible, for instance, especially if you have 4+ years of record-keeping required by law).
A small company can recreate a week's work in a few days on top of normal work if necessary, and for the hundred-to-one chance of it happening that might well be cost-effective compared to having to up their quotas, keep many more backups (7 times more, or have to cut their possible-history by 1/7th for the same price), change tapes, tie up the servers, etc. A weekend backup would not be unusual at all for a small business.
It also depends very much on the cost of recreating your data. As an IT guy, you can blindly say "We just have to put all our money into backups" but from a business point of view, that's not necessarily cost-effective even if you assume worst-case-scenarios. I'd much rather put more money into regularly working out WHAT needs to be backed up and doing so once a week than being forever complacent and backing up every day. Worst case, you lose a week's work. Same as if there was a flood, or a riot, or a problem with the building, or (in some industries / countries) a holiday, etc.
I specialise in working for schools - bringing back the ones that have slipped into trouble so they are working again - and I see some god-awful messes that I have to clear up. Daily backups don't always save you, especi
I think the REAL problem is that even the smallest brains have several billion neurons, with each having 10's of thousands of connections to other neurons. This chip simulates ONE such connection.
That's a PCB-routing problem that you REALLY don't want, and way outside the scale of anything that we build (it's like every computer on the planet having 10,000 direct Ethernet connections to nearby computers - no switches, hubs, routers, etc. in order to simulate something approaching a small mouse's brain - not only a cabling and routing nightmare but where the hell do you plug it all in?). Not only that, by a real brain learns by breaking and creating connections all the time.
The analog nature of the neuron isn't really the key to making "artificial brains" - the problem is simply scale. We will never be able to produce enough of these chips and tie them together well enough to produce anything conventionally interesting (and certainly nothing that we could actually analyse any better than the brain of any other species). If we did, it would be unmanageably unprogrammable and unpredictable. If it did anything interesting on its own, we'd never understand how or why it did that.
And I think the claim that they know EVERYTHING about how a neuron works (at least one part of it) is optimistic at best.
Ah, these people who've never played a game where you only have keyboard controls because menuing systems didn't exist or were resource intensive. How's your Playstation that my generation invented for you?
If you're really *that* bad, play one of the many GUI's for the base game. But your ADOM would never have existed if NetHack hadn't been around nearly TEN YEARS before it came out, before Windows had even hit version 2.0 and got proper windowing support.
Those of us who grew up with "redefine keys" options have almost zero problems with memorising the 3-4 vital buttons that play 99% of the game and having many other options available at the press of a button if they need them.
Nearly 70 and doing everything I can to avoid a computer for my entire retirement?
Replayability.
Even something as silly as Nethack has almost infinite replayability, and that's why it's popular. (It doesn't mean that making games replayable will instantly make them hits, but it's certainly a large factor).
I've realised, though, that no matter what games I emulate from my "golden" period of gaming, that I quickly get bored of them and move onto other games, except for a certain handful that you *can* just keep playing over and over again even if you've played them for 20 years on-and-off.
Modern games rely on things like multiplayer options to provide their replayability but that relies on people *wanting* to play it online to the extent that they setup / buy / manage servers / games for it. Multiplayer really was the death of creativity in videogames.
The problem is that games authors don't match replayability with making money. If someone can only reasonably play a game once or twice before they get bored / stop having fun, then they'll go and buy another - maybe a sequel - instead. It's not directly profitable to make a game replayable. It's a rare instance where a replayable game can just make that amount of money overnight because of people "rewarding" them, effectively, for making such an enjoyable bit of gameplay - few others will enjoy that success even if their game is better AND more replayable.
I judge my Steam purchases by hours of gameplay per pound (about $1.50). Anything over 10 hours per pound is usually pretty good. Some games are in the hundreds of hours per pound. Most half-decent games manage at least 1 hour per pound. Anything below that I consider a loss. So the game has to be either amazing and long (rare - HL2 managed it), or it has to be cheap, or it has to be very replayable.
How many games, when you replay, do you end up doing the same things, talking to the same characters, hitting the same buttons, being "ambushed" at the same points, etc.? (I tired of Magicka very quickly because of that (and because of their stupid save system).
How many have a formula - "press this button, then hide on that platform and shoot until everything's dead" - that, once you work it out, you can follow and be pretty certain of constantly making progress? Even HL2 is guilty of both problems and thus why I've never really replayed it.
But silly things like Minecraft, Nethack (and spin-offs like Dungeons of Dredmor), Elite and a thousand other games are replayable enough that even if you *DID* make it through and complete the game, you could go back for more and it would be different. For HL2 you'd still be subject to the same cutscenes, the same forced route, the same decisions, etc.
It's not just an "open-plan" game like the Grand Theft Autos - you still have to do the same mash of missions in the same time in the same way doing the same things in those even if you have choice of which one to do when - but a replayable game. Replayable games can even be quite repetitive at times, but they don't stop being fun to play because it "feels" different - like you've acclimatised to how the world works but it's still a new world each time with its own challenges.
Big-name games don't have the same replayability that they used to - it's definitely followed the indie genre more than the commercial publishers. Sequel after sequel after sequel don't make something more replayable - it's like the difference between being given three "one night" game rentals, and being given three games. With modern games, you'd hardly notice the difference because you'll never load them again, but with the best games, you'd much rather pay more and own them forever and get to play them as much as you'd like.
As someone who's racked up over 500 hours on Altitude, 100 hours on Dungeons of Dredmor, 1000's of hours on Counterstrike, it's disappointing that most of what make them great is missing from commercial games that people queue outside stores for, see advertised on TV, etc.
Replayability is the key. If I don't get an hour per pou
I have a mental checklist of things I notice about people when I meet them.
Almost without fail, those who openly and spontaneously profess a love for their country are those who don't actually realise (or won't admit) it's failings and are part of the cause of those failings. "America is the best country in the world" is a typical example that I often hear.
But those who openly and spontaneously put their own country down actually care about it enough to do so and "love" their country more.
Personally, I detest some of the things that my country has done (not least, following America into a fake "war") - I think they are abhorrent and reckless and thoughtless - but I detest them because I'm *disappointed* that it was my country that did them.
Literally, my country should be better than that. We aren't, because we did them, but we should be. And it's because I care about what my country does to its own people, people in other countries, its reputation, etc. that I am more likely to tell people the things we did wrong rather than the things we do right (How many Brits know about the Singapore pull-out in WW2? How many Americans realise how the UK treated the Ghurka despite what they've done for us?)
The UK isn't "free" (because I don't think there can be such a thing) but we are certainly "freer" than a lot of other places and yet I still point out all the stupid restrictions we have at every opportunity because I want my country to be *better*. It seems to me that a lot of the Americans I meet think their country is already "the best" and "free" and so they don't strive to better their country and its image in other countries. Everybody should just love them because they are the best (and if you watch the movie Love Actually, you'll see a very contrived but incredibly accurate depiction of how the US treats the UK politically and what our response SHOULD be).
It's like the difference between "We did what we thought was best" and "We should never have done that". Both statements may even refer to the same incident, but one attitude is superior, the other a lesson to learn from, and either tells you a hell of a lot about the people who say them.
It's partly because, of course, the Europeans are a number of otherwise independent states so it's like a democracy on an international scale - chances are that SOMEONE will kick up a fuss about something that they disagree with and concessions will have to be made (e.g. the UK still isn't in the Euro for various reasons, Germany doesn't want to be involved in more Greek bailouts etc.).
When you have internal opposition on the scale of national governments, it's a bit more even and controlled than when you have only internal opposition that consists of singular people (who, history has shown, can be corrupt, swayed or just chosen so that they are all of a certain age / mindset).
That said, I've never seen a country less free than America. The only sad fact is that they don't notice it. At least the Chinese KNOW where they are (whether they care or not is another matter) but the US just don't seem to understand what they are doing to themselves and what they are letting slip under their noses. So long as they have their guns and their god, they seem perfectly happy to let a multitude of sins pass through with their approval. Hell, they were close to getting national healthcare and they managed to balls that up too.
And the Americans I've spoken to in person just don't get this... they don't understand that, actually, the stereotype of an American that doesn't know or cares what happens beyond its borders is a little more than just a stereotype. They don't care that, even today, their government imprisons and (still probably) tortures people who haven't gone on trial by doing it on foreign soil. That's "freedom" to them, because it's applied to a different type of person - non-Americans. Try to move on a guy from sitting on Wall Street, though, and it makes the news for days on end. When they show the Olympics you only see Americans winning and *NOTHING* else.
America has many problems, like just about every other country in the world, but it's like those countries that call themselves The Democratic Republic Of, or the People's Republic Of, etc. They are anything but. Land of the Free? Yeah, Land of the Free so long as you stay within our borders, have enough money for healthcare, and never ask for anything we don't want to give you.
Depends what you use.
I still have an original EPIA board that's still running after MANY years of use in a school, then used as a project-kit for myself (it outlived the school's age at which they replace). Never once witnessed a crash on it in its entire life (it's currently booting Linux 2.4 off a CF card, I think - been so long since I needed to fiddle, I don't even remember).
Just what the hell do you do to destroy a low-power CPU in an embedded device and not take the motherboard with it?
-- Someone who's managed many thousands of machines over the last 15 years and NEVER, repeat NEVER, had to replace a CPU on its own (whether for faults or upgrades). I can count the instances I've had to change a motherboard on my fingers, too, and mostly because of crappy capacitors and faulty external ports. And every time, it was age that killed it and it wasn't anywhere near practical to source a replacement board that took the same CPU vs just buying something twice as powerful for the same price.
Almost every laptop in the world has a built-in CPU that's almost impossible to change and nobody seems to suffer from that. Personally, I find the whole socket idea ridiculous and think *everything* should be like the Mini-ITX - rarely is there an opportunity where you deliberately *don't* buy the top-of-the-range CPU that will fit on a particular motherboard and then later, when you do want to upgrade, you upgrade JUST the CPU on its own (if there's even a compatible one still being produced by then!).
My first PC (a 386 with 1Mb) had a case that literally opened at the touch of a button and lifted up on gas-struts so you could fiddle inside because you had to all the time. The last 5 years, I've just got a huge pile of expansion cards and RAM modules salvaged from old PC's and stock that I've never once had the chance to use to upgrade or revive a machine. I honestly can't remember the last time I fitted an expansion card of any time but think it may have been a PCI card. The last time I put a CPU in a socket? About 8 years ago when a 5-year-old PC managed to completely dry-out its heatsink compound and it needed reapplying (and ran for another 4 years without any problems).
Socketed CPU's aren't a problem that needs solving any more, and when you do want to upgrade it'll be cheaper to buy a whole new board + CPU with the latest redesign of the damn socket anyway. Hell, I've specified 100's or 1000's of pounds of equipment over the last few years and never once considered (or really cared) what socket anything used - it's just not necessary.
Paint your car-tyres with it and you'll never have to clean them again and they'll wear much more slowly and give you a boost in fuel economy due to reduce friction!
If style issues bother you, run your code through a styler before and after you receive them from your source-code management system.
Really, style and content in C are as separate as they are in HTML and CSS. If you want a certain way of spacing things, generate a rule that turns everything into your style before you see it and converts back to whatever the agreed style is before you publish it for others. It really makes no difference to the compiler, only the programmer. And the programmer that can't even set up a simple code-styler is the one who should be shot or (more likely) sacked.
My Eclipse C IDE setup is perfectly set to the settings that I want and use. Other people hate it. I like my loop braces on completely independent lines (so if and condition are on line 1, loop brace on line 2, loop content on the next few lines, loop brace on next line, else statement - possibly with condition on next line, loop brace on next line, "else" content and then loop brace on a final line), I use the double-slash comment syntax for multi-line comments (and reserve the star-slash syntax for when I'm commenting out a block of code), I tab indent everything but it's really a four-space indent each time, I enclose each case blocks in switches statements with curly-quotes, I like spaces in between every function parameter and even either side of any assignment-equals, and a million and one other "crimes" that some people don't like. My code is still C99, though, and takes seconds to reapply formatting style to whatever you want if you have a decent IDE or SCM.
Personally, I always keep the * with the variable - because that is what it applies to. It's nothing to do with the int, that's just the contents of it (you "read" pointers from right to left - int * is a pointer to an int, int ** is a pointer to a pointer to an int), but the fact it's a pointer is a million times more important not to get confused (and as the poster above explains, it's easy to do). Yes, your compiler should catch most stupidity but relying on your compiler to spot your stupidity is stupidity in itself.
As soon as you start getting into double-pointers (**), then you generate a world of hurt for yourself by trying to keep them with the type. I always think of pointers as *entirely* different things to variables because you can have a pointer to a range of different types beyond the built-in types, but something is either a pointer, or not a pointer and changing it requires a particular keyword (& or *). The * is a special indicator of this unique property and should follow the variable, not the type.
I also prefer:
void *function_name(int parameter)
even though:
void* function_name(int parameter)
is perfectly legal. Strangely, I see a lot of programmers who write variable pointers differently to functions that return a pointer, etc. And don't even get me started on what happens when you have a function pointer to a function that returns a pointer of some kind (which I most commonly hit when loading DLL's dynamically and trying not to stomp over declarations in the library header files that would require linking the static library to work without interfering). There's all sorts of hideous choices that can be made there.
Any foodstuff with a nationality in it's name will never have been heard of by people within that nation.
English muffin. Someone once tried to tell me about "English cucumbers" (which apparently have no skin - what the hell?). The French call custard "Creme Anglais", etc. Italians have an ice cream called Zuppa Inglese (when we've never had any such thing).
None of which you'll EVER find in an English restaurant at all.
"buying the recorded music unit of EMI for $1.9 billion"
"It's expected that a consortium led by Sony will soon purchase EMI's publishing unit for upwards of $2 billion."
"company executives believe they can persuade regulators to allow it to swallow the business whole because the music industry is in such decline."
1.9bn for a single (apparently struggling) company. Wow. Wish my company was in such decline. Strange that an industry can decline while those producing the devices that music plays are and those selling music (albeit online now rather than physical) are at their most popular and profitable in the entire history of music.
Hell, those idiots only started counting digital sales in the UK Top 10 just about a year ago. In denial much?
1) Windows was free for me. My employer paid for it. It's "only" XP (but has a 7 install disk if I could be bothered) but it's more than good enough for everything I want to do.
2) Most Steam games run on Windows and not on Linux.
3) That's about it.
There's nothing work-wise I can't do on Linux and OS-alternatives, there's nothing home-wise that I'd find more convenient on Windows except games. Hell, I still pine for K3B's interface and make-do with CDBurnerXP Pro instead.
And those games are my "Right, I'll double-click, get thrown into another world for half-hour, and escape the tedium of software development / PC management / fiddling with options for a while" so there's no real joy in going through the effort of *making* them work on Linux or playing with options to make them work better. They are literally my one-click escape from having to DO things like that for a living.
I've actually done it and transferred my usual desktop applications (which are all cross-platform) and to a Linux machine and been able to work and do home stuff with no problems whatsoever for years at a time. It's there. It's free. It works just as good.
The only thing "keeping" me on Windows is Steam. Take my Windows licence off me tomorrow and that's the only thing that would suffer until I could get around to setting it up. I really wouldn't notice anything else.
Hell, when I do some programming, I have cross-platform programs that do little else but replicate a Linux-like environment on Windows so I can actually get things done (Eclipse, GCC, MinGW, etc.).
The trouble is, my investment in Windows-only games in much higher than my investment in anything else, and I can do "anything else" on any OS at all. It's only the games that NEED Windows and everything else happily works under Windows, so it makes more sense to use Windows generally (so long as you're not paying for it).
If I didn't have my games, a Linux machine has always and will always serve me just as well for everything else. In my opinion, Linux has arrived and done what it promised on the desktop. If I were a millionaire tomorrow and needed to kit out a company, it would be Linux all the way. The only "problem" is that games programmed to be Windows-only don't work perfectly and immediately and at the same performance level on a reliable basis (i.e. I can't guarantee they will run when I first install them) on Linux, which is hardly a fault in Linux at all.
It's like blaming MS that I can't run some old Linux-binary version of TuxRacer on it. Sure, I could recompile, but I want ONLY THAT BINARY to work. That's the problem with games - not made to be cross-platform.