Please explain how you account for a random process surmounting "huge odds" while completely discounting "randomness". Just because there are "huge odds" against it (how huge exactly? How many submerged vessels, in how much ocean, travelling at what speed, for how many years... I'm a maths graduate and I wouldn't like to THINK how complicated the maths behind that could get and I would probably put down money, after a back-of-the-envelope calculation, that it was almost inevitable to have happened within the operational lifespan of a modern sub. Humans are *TERRIBLE* at judging probability... the birthday problem is an example of this) doesn't mean that it's not likely AT SOME POINT, or GIVEN ENOUGH TIME, or even IF THERE ARE A LOT OF SUBS.
Even if the odds ARE huge. So what? Things like that happen. You can't say "we demand an explanation of why the one meterorite that hit Earth the other week landed on top of a nice old lady". The odds are huge but that doesn't mean it's impossible, avoidable, or anything else. What you're suggesting is the equivalent of launching a full-scale investigation based on zero evidence (it wasn't your meteorite, or your granny) with the prejudicial aim of fitting a meteor shield to all old ladies.
The fact is that we have NO idea what happened (which is why the story is a month late), nor will we ever unless the relevant governments decide to declassify it. Even if they were following each other and playing some harmless wargames, so what? That is what they are SUPPOSED to do. I want troops onboard that vessel that CAN follow a French sub for miles without being detected even though France is their ally - it's the sort of thing that you do to boost morale, practice skills and show other countries what you are capable of should they get on your bad side... sneak up behind them and then when they are least suspecting it, give them a loud sonar ping to stir them up a bit.
Some countries won't even tell you how many nuclear subs they actually have, it's such a secret matter. You think that a press campaign based on "these two controlled objects which were both indetectable to each other and probably flying blind and were both moving in roughly the same place collided, so we need to know everything and fit all our nuclear subs with bumpers and flashing lights to prevent a repeat" is going to do ANYTHING?
It's been blown out of all proportion. I don't see anybody complaining about the ex-Russian satellite that obliterated another nation's satellite last week. Maybe we should launch a full-scale investigation on that in a kangaroo court too. It's almost certain that there was nuclear material on both satellites.
Humans do not percieve risk correctly. The subs were relatively unharmed, in fact probably MILES fom being harmed (it would have to be a ten times faster collision, or similar to pose any risk most probably), there was an extremely low risk of anything rupturing to the point that they would sink. If either of them DID sink, it's more likely the war that starts over the political aspects of the sinking kills more people than would EVER be killed by all the nuclear weapons on board both ships (taken over the course of their entire lifetime). If they sank and the weapons spilled - they are allies - they know exactly what that means... back off, apologise, offer assistance in their rescue and don't do ANYTHING that might look like you were trying to steal the weapons. Seal off the area, perform a bog-standard recovery and get on with life. Nothing is going to go boom.
Minor incident, happened before, blown out of all proportion, tabloid headline, ARGH END OF WORLD!, knee-jerk reactions to put in place things that can't POSSIBLY stop anything similar happening in the future.
The bit I find hilarious about every showing of this story that I've seen on the net, is that everyone says "How can this have happened?"
Do *you* want to tell the French where all our nuclear subs are at any moment in time? Do the French want to tell us where all their nuclear subs are at any moment in time? Do *you* want to be in a country where all our nuclear subs light up the sonar of any passing ship like a Christmas tree?
No. Therefore, it's an INCREDIBLE show of the power of the anti-detection capabilities of these subs that they BOTH manouvered close enough to each other to collide without EITHER of them detecting the other. That's bloody fantastic. A technology used by the military that actually works in production and has an incredibly relevant use.
As to what happens in a collision... if ANY country in the world truly has nuclear weapons that can be set off without being ARMED first, then we have a bigger problem than what happens if two tiny ships in a vast, three-dimensional ocean might happen to accidentally collide. These things NEED to withstand just about anything, or else the enemy just fires one shot in the right place and "Blam!"... nuclear detonation without ever having owned a nuclear weapon.
Similarly for the onboard reactor. Nuclear subs are not fragile, and their designers not stupid (as has been proved by the anti-sonar technology!)... if a sub is really that easy to sink / destroy and leak radiation enough to matter, then they become nothing more than timebombs. When they next dock for repairs etc. (which cannot really be hidden from satellites, etc.), just blow them up and you've set off a nuclear warhead / contaminated the seas inside your enemies own country.
This is my point. When ordinary communications are intercepted, the governments can only chase their own tails. It's like the Australian ISP filtering - it only needs one ISP not to play ball or one way around it and *everyone* will use it because they can't get the things they are getting today otherwise.
Of course it will be fought, but it won't be long before it's impossible for the government to do / ban anything because it will be impossible to distinguish legitimate traffic from other traffic. You can't ban P2P when your own state TV and radio stations, research projects, etc. rely on being able to connect to random, anonymous peers who share traffic. iPlayer makes up 1/3rd of all UK traffic at your average ISP. Other P2P takes up the majority of the remaining traffic with email / web / other taking up the tiny bit that's left. They can't cut off P2P instantly, therefore it has the opportunity (and the motive and means) to evolve to a place where it cannot be stopped AT ALL. How long before an application comes out that provides another "killer" use of P2P to the average person - free live TV streaming of the expensive sports channels? I know people who would gladly spend thousands of hours to get that working for themselves in place of the legitimate footage on offer (come on, some of the sports channels charge £30/month to view them and then *extra* to view anything vaguely interesting).
And, let's assume the impossible happens, and the government filters all the official channels. That's hefty control that would require world-wide co-ordination and alienate the vast majority of the population (those who weren't brought up with such restrictions). Even in China, people get onto the "real" web and bypass filters. What happens then is that official Internet transit lines become no-go areas. Wireless takes over and you'll get people building, selling, and setting up mesh networking. Even if it's just national, rather than international, there's still a massive impetus to provide communications to everybody anonymously. You'll have people stringing together their *own* Internet (that is, after all, all it is in the first place) and because the anonymous, secure, protocols run *on top* of this, you won't even notice the difference. It might be a bit slower, but then, depending on your current end-point, it might be a lot faster (e.g. 54MBps to a well-connected neighbour vs 512Kbps to an ISP at the other end of the country).
The point is that it's the social element that will kill attempts to filter the Internet in countries that have an established history of being able to access it unfiltered. The Internet is nothing more than a collection of networks, not the "Internet" people are used to (i.e. has to connect over a well-known backend provider via a large commercial entity to another country), and as soon as people realise that even Joe down the road has something they might want, it can be a matter of hours before people are meshing their networks together with their friends, their friend's friends and so on. Even if you just use the mesh for P2P to share music and the "filtered" Internet for general stuff, it's still taken a massive hold on your life and then if someone comes up with a way to show you the unfiltered Internet for free on your P2P/mesh network, what is the first thing you will do? Abandon the "normal" Internet. (P2P melds well in concept with meshing because you don't need to know an explicit route to the endpoint, or well-defined numbering schemes, and you're prepared to pass on a lot of other people's traffic in order to get that tiny bit of vital traffic that you've been hunting for for years).
Again, there's always a weak link in controlling such a scheme - it only needs ONE of those people to have a connection to ONE other place that connects to an unfiltered Internet to render the whole connection "open" and "uncensored". Before that, though, it's the P2P content-sharing that will make it popular - after all, this works better the more peopl
It will force coders to create a better system. It will promote the use of another protocol/network that is immune to particular traits of law/jurisdiction that The Pirate Bay may fall foul of. In the meantime, hundreds of pretenders will show up to take the flak and the sheer volume means that all that can be done is trying to shut them down one at a time with legal threats.
Just look at the history of ANY P2P system and it's pretty much identical.
Give it a few more years, the Internet will be nothing but the basis of a global, anonymous, reliable, authenticatable P2P system that everybody uses to do everything. We have the technology (Tor, CloudVPN, Bittorrent, DHT, etc.), it's just a matter of fine-tuning and prevelance. As an additional bonus, it then won't matter that some people are using IPv6 and some IPv4 - everything will be in this cloud of dark smoke that you can only see what enters and leaves and nothing inbetween. You'll be able to tell that User X shared an MP3 if you are able to see all of User X's traffic. You'll be able to see that User Y downloaded an MP3 if you are able to see all of User Y's traffic. But even compromising User X completely won't reveal to you who User Y is or was. Trying to masquerade as User X without their private key would be useless, so the best you could do (even with the key) would be to propogate false content to... who? Nobody would know - everything is just an anonymous connection from a dozen random peers.
The media companies and governments are, by a process of digital evolution, driving anonymous communications into necessities and they become more prevelant with each generation. Hardly anybody warezed back in the 90's as a percentage of Internet users - now most ordinary people know how to find and download illegal content in a few clicks. Each time the problem of "piracy" is "fixed", it crops up yet again, somewhere else, in a new form that's more convenient, faster, harder to prove and more ubiquitous.
Even in terms of general users - the only things that people ever ask me about when the subject comes up are "something like Napster or something". They've never used Napster but the fame of being shut down was enough to make them into a household name for free/illegal content. Do it to The Pirate Bay (whose name I'm already getting mentioned in conversations from people who I thought couldn't work a mouse) and the same will happen.
It doesn't mean that they *shouldn't* be shutting down The Pirate Bay, or that The Pirate Bay are somehow "right" or "heroes". They have taken advantage of an interesting legal technicality. It just means that you're not going to win with the sorts of tactics where you just try and shut the sites down. Maybe the opportunity for the media companies EVER winning has now passed and they'll never be able to anymore - who knows? But they are trying to catch fog in a net... this isn't a problem they can solve by shutting down a server - they need something else. I don't know what. They certainly don't. But until it exists, they are playing a losing game.
Oh, by the way, I converted/ported/maintain an SDL port of Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection to the GP2X. I know *exactly* the problem you are talking about. I end up fixing what people see as problems myself, because it's hard to get code to go upstream and a lot of my user's problems are related to the nature of the port (running on a device without a mouse or keyboard, just a joystick, for example). I've had to tweak several games to make sure they don't do stupid things and work around a lot of "PC-isms" in the code just to satisfy my users.
I've had tons of users come to me and ask if I can put in "interruptible generation" (that is, being able to cancel a puzzle if it's taking too long to generate one). All of the 31 puzzles in my version of the collection (including some of my own making and some I found in other places) are generated dynamically by some of the most complex code I've had to play with. To just *stop* this single-threaded, C-based, dynamically-allocated-memory code that can easily run for hours on even the most powerful machine if you put in silly numbers, when it's running on an embedded processor with 32Mb RAM and a 200MHz CPU, and to stop it in a way that the overseeing threads can recover and continue at a convenient point means understanding the entire puzzle generator (and therefore the puzzle itself, plus a lot of game theory and programming logic) and solver. Just so that when an idiot user builds a stupidly large puzzle (which will probably run out of memory within the first few moves anyway) they don't have to reset their GP2X (which takes about 5 seconds and teaches them not to do it again).
The other requests I had included lots of reasonable requests, which I tried to take account of as much as I possibly could, but I still haven't made this one practical without understanding every puzzle I touch. It took me several months to track down a stupid crash problem with the Minesweeper code (I mean, come on, it's minesweeper! I was writing minesweeper games ten years ago on my TI-85 graphical calculator), because the code was so complex I couldn't follow it even in a debugger line-by-line. Turned out to be a faulty library providing an inadequate version of memset, but it took the original author of the puzzle, some ARM disassembly and a lot of work to spot that! Users don't care though - as far as they are concerned "that port crashes". Nothing to do with whether it's my fault, or a problem upstream, or a faulty library, or code that's virtually inaccessible without months of study - it just "doesn't work" and they want it fixed.
You have to do your best to meet their expectations - they are the driver. You're just a code-monkey that does it for fun!:-)
There's nothing worse than a developer who refuses to listen to his users. It annoys me, greatly. You don't have to concede everything (otherwise you'd end up with the Turbo-Hyper-Fighting edition where they can play multiplayer across the Internet with Mario, based on real-time data sucked from their personal Facebook account, etc.) but you do have to listen.
If *several* users are saying that the hint button would be valuable, then to those users, it *would* be valuable. You can make it optional (i.e. a "Hard" difficulty where you can't use the hint button) and so not alienate established users who don't *want* to use it. You can make it so they have to "earn" a hint powerup. You can make it so that they can't submit their scores online if they have used hints, and so on.
I tend to find that "make it optional" is a cure-all for the vast majority of problems like this.
Additionally, this is the problem I have with 99% of computer game sequels - the players say for years how good it would be to finally do X in the game and the sequel totally ignores the possibility. Often, you then find people patching the original to do X in place of buying the sequel. The GTA series is a big example of this - MultiTheftAuto would have been infinitely popular if it was tied into the games that it was available for, but nobody ever bothered (despite even the original GTA having integrated multiplayer). Suddenly, with GTA 4 - Hmm, let's put some multiplayer back in.
The users are your BEST source of ideas... you will dry up for ideas after a while. You won't play the games anywhere near as much as they do (honestly!). Their collective testing power vastly outweighs anything even the biggest company can afford to do. This is how the best stuff appears - this is how Valve works, for example - release a game that's easily moddable, let people mod it, buy the mods, sell them back to the users. It happened with Quake, too. Quake multiplayer gets dull quickly but being able to load up new user-created content from *their* ideas, even if it's thing that you never wanted implemented, are what keeps the game fresh, interesting and popular.
Listen to your users. Yeah, it's a pain to filter out the crap. Yeah, it's disheartening that people get more excited over a hint button and anti-aliased fonts than your super-duper complicated solve system. But at the end of the day, these are the people that make programming worthwhile - would you have carried on making the game if your websites/distributors said that nobody had downloaded it?
Bugger! People don't want to pay £15 to sit for hours in a dirty, smelly, sticky cinema to watch disgusting, blurry, washed-out reproductions of Hollywood movies that take twenty minutes to start (while accusing them of everything from theft to supporting terrorism), where a hot dog costs more than the ticket, the drinks are 99.999% water and the staff are similarly dirty, smelly and sticky.
The madmen would rather sit at home in comfort with their HDTV's and get a better quality image close up! What are they thinking?!
Hey, we need to get our customers back, so let's add a useless 3D element to our movies that everybody has been able to do but nobody has cared about in the last fifty years!
Seriously, the last four or five times I went into a cinema in a large town not 10 minutes from London, there were about three people in there, including me. They need a new gimmick and they think it will bring back the audiences. It won't. The problem isn't the type of movie projection - it's the quality of the systems (all the films I've seen this year have been blurry, out of focus and even when in focus look very horrible), the atmosphere of the cinema (which is all-but-gone now), the service recieved and the price you pay. I can OWN a copy of a film cheaper than I can go to the cinema once, and it will "appear" better quality because I'm closer to a higher-quality screen. Plus, I can pause it to get a real hotdog, or I can invite friends over.
Yes, and still people don't listen. What's the incentive to visit a website that a) doesn't work itself or that b) the majority of its content is links to websites that don't work?
People should be CHECKING these things because, as you rightly point out, 10 years is a long time to keep giving the same hints. Every time SlashDot does something stupid, I'm less and less keen to use it. Linking to a broken link (caused, in no small part, by not checking that the link works or is capable of handling the traffic) is stupid. It won't be working for DAYS now, by which time I won't want to see it. In fact, all this has made me do is go *elsewhere* to find a link. Hopefully, if enough people realise that it's actually a problem, it will be fixed. This is better than your solution which appears to be "That's what we do here... link to broken stuff... get over it".
Not only slashdot'ted, but super-slashdot'ted. I can't even get a byte back from them. And coral cache has similar problems.
Hint, in case this hasn't already occurred to people: DO NOT LINK TO A WEBSITE THAT CAN'T HANDLE TRAFFIC. Seriously, I don't think a single poster here has managed to actually see the screenshots at all.
This is the problem with heavily-dynamic websites - a few visitors and you need to add extra servers. At least with static content, you can serve up to the capacity of your internet connection.
In other words... we don't want anybody to buy our cheapest product, so we'll enforce a ludicrous restriction never used in any other OS or software company before, with some statistical justification in the hopes that people will "think" we offer cheap products but still buy the expensive ones which are virtually identical but have a one-bit flag difference between them.
The average user might only use one or two "apps" but it's the definition of apps that's the problem. Apparently AV isn't an app, by this definition. But a firewall might be. A utility to check your startup entries might be. What about the Adobe Reader Speed Launcher, is that an app? Notepad? This is the problem - they are drawing a boundary where it doesn't make ANY sense to anybody. To users, their startup entries are not apps. But to the professional, a startup entry which works around the app limit could well be the downfall of the entire system that could allow companies or charities to save money by buying the cheaper Starter editions.
They are trying to introduce an artificial limitation based on the intended use, rather than just targetting the intended use - cheap, compatible, standard, available for home use. Instead, they want you to "think" that somebody actually buys that crap and that you are a "power user" because you have more than three apps open, thus leading you to believe that you have to buy a "more powerful" operating system for more money.
It's crap. Nobody will buy it, like nobody bought the other starter editions... because it's an artificial limitation for no good, technical reason.
I'm not a fire expert by any means but several things really annoyed me about the video linked to on the BBC article. Mostly about the realism of the situation and several to do with "training" people to do things correctly.
First - WHY DON'T THEY SHUT THE DOORS THAT LEAD TO A FIRE... chances are opening those doors where a fire was on the other side would probably have killed you quite quickly anyway, but for God's sake, SHUT THE DOOR, if you're not going that way to reduce the available oxygen. It's an FPS engine so you should be penalising people for not shutting the damn fire-doors after them.
Second - Why are the doors just "flung" open without checking - what happened to all the training I had as a child to put the back of my hand on the door, open it slowly etc. in case the fire was on the other side of the door I'm opening. You have an FPS engine, this should have been put in as your only "weapon".
Third - Why were there fires on metal stairs, and why only halfway up the staircase and WHY, when going into a stairwell which is obviously on fire within mere feet of the "down" stairs, do they continue to use the stairwell to go down? Abandon the attempt and back off if you don't want to die.
Fourth - No smoke. Fill the burning rooms with smoke, so that you can only just see the exit signs or, indeed, the fire. Much more realistic and useful (I can find my out of any building in broad daylight - that's not the problem you're testing here).
Fifth - That CS department modelled is really crap in terms of signposting the fire exits and I only saw one fire extinguisher on the entire three floors the character went through (though I might have missed one because it only occurred to me halfway through that I didn't rememeber seeing one). Stop making simulations and sort the real situation out if that model is any reflection on the actual physical location.
Sixth-form students (now called Year 13's) being taught how to program by someone who would literally read one page in front each lesson to prepare for the next from a outdated textbook. They were actually physics or maths teachers, mostly, who hadn't even used a programming language like FORTRAN or BASIC back in their studies (one claimed to have used a punch-card system for "something" back in university, but couldn't remember anything about it).
They also "taught" other teachers how to run the course for their Year 13's. The course language? I've seen this happen with BBC BASIC (back when I was being taught - yes, I was taught BBC BASIC in Year 13 by someone who'd never used it, and couldn't do anything that didn't have a direct example in their textbook, at the same time as I was learning to convert my knowledge of FORTRAN, Pascal, etc. towards C and the more modern languages.), Java, Visual Basic, and even "Excel". Yes, I was a witness to a *programming* course taught using Excel's VBScript-macro-language. I kid you not. The kids did a surprisingly good job of making a bunch of games using just Excel.
Now imagine that these people don't understand the basic concepts of programming (variable types, loops, etc.) and towards the end of the course have to support 30 students, all making different types of programs from scratch, and have nothing but a twenty-year-old textbook to refer to. Guess who ends up fixing all the kids courseworks, being dragged into every problem and even (in the BBC BASIC example) *students* taking the bloody class while the teacher hastily jotted down notes on what the students were teaching.
"that once EVERYONE has one of these [Access points], [WEP] will be cracked sufficiently and we'll be back to square one but tied into millions of devices incorporating a useless and obsolete security "standard""
I don't see how that's drivel or a poor reflection of the WEP situation, it being the shit-heap of an encryption standard that it was. Introduced in 1997, cracked to hell by 2001 - I've had computers that have gone longer than that between reboots. So just as it was put in products, standardised and people were using it, it was a waste of time. And if WEP had incorporated the capacity to negotiate encryption algorithms (like every decent cryptography-based standard out there), it wouldn't have been a problem (WEP cracked? change the underlying encryption / integrity check / number of rounds). I'm not saying that anyone KNEW it was vulnerable when it was published as a standard, but they did know that just about every algorithm gets cracked before long and they should have had a bit more foresight in their standard. In the end, they had to deprecate the standard, prevent it's use in anything serious and propose an alternative standard (requiring alternative hardware, because the replacement that was meant to be used on the same hardware [WPA] has also been similarly reduced to worthless now).
I call it the "Base unit". Even the people who never touch computers can deal with that terminology. "Computer" = "Base unit" + "Monitor" + "Keyboard" + etc.
Would you like to explain how you teach other teachers to teach children IT when you yourself know nothing about it, the people below you know even less?
This "a good teacher can teach anything" is a bit of a fallacy. Sure, I can talk my walk through a hour of stuff I don't understand, but it doesn't mean I'm teaching. I can even make the kids "understand" it. It doesn't mean that what I'm teaching them helps them any.
I had a teacher who tried to teach me BBC BASIC back in the day and had never programmed. I ended up taking the class because nobody could understand what he was waffling on about. Everyone else just thought he was incoherent or a poor teacher, when in fact he knew NOTHING and the little he did state with certainty was wrong.
How short-sighted is it to tie into one encryption standard? Idiots.
You need to *at least* make various encryptions pluggable and software-upgradeable because I guarantee that Murphy's Law says that once EVERYONE has one of these hard drive, AES will be cracked sufficiently and we'll be back to square one but tied into millions of devices incorporating a useless and obsolete security "standard. It'll be WEP all over again, even down to 99% of people being "assured" that their hard drive is safe, and then finding out the reality.
Plus, the DRM potential is obvious. I thought the ATA standard had the facility to implement disk encryption anyway - isn't that one of the features used on the XBox or something to lock the hard drives to a particular machine? - you have to send a password across the bus as an ATA packet before the drive will permit any access at all.
I've worked with "Head of IT" Teachers who can't install a simple application and don't understand "read-only" attributes. I've worked with IT teachers who teach that the main components of a PC are a monitor and a hard drive "which contains all the other bits of the computer, including the CDROM". I've worked with IT teachers who have NEVER programmed a single line in their life, trying to teach people how to use a programming language. I've worked with IT teachers who are reluctant to let go of their floppies because they can't handle USB drives. I've worked with IT teachers who have *zero* concept of licensing and just install everything everywhere.
Unfortunately, I met most of those people while working at a specialist IT secondary school / Academy.
It's common to most schools and to most subjects and even to most teachers - they might have a *related* degree (i.e. maths teachers with physics backgrounds, or even IT teachers with "business" backgrounds) or an actual degree in their subject but it doesn't mean that they understand the most fundamental things they are supposed to be teaching.
There are exceptions, as always, but it's true for the vast majority. At one point, I was tempted to do the extra 1 year PGCE in the UK in order to go back into those schools and show people that, actually, a network manager can do their job in a trice, but they can't hold a stick to a good network manager. Unfortunately, it would mean having to come down to their level for that entire year and I'm not sure I could manage it without pissing myself laughing.
I wonder, then, if this was a factor. If you had an appendix, the current theory goes, then it would contain and isolate some of those gut flora that existed before you got ill. Thus, when you were ill enough to have to re-populate the gut, the appendix would have re-populated it with the same (or similar, or a subset of your original) flora.
It's being touted only as a possibility but in completely unscientific, anecdotal evidence, the few people I have heard of with similar complaints had their appendix removed at some point prior to the problem.
It's a touchy subject and it depends on your beliefs and how you go about doing it.
Does donating cord blood to a public entity that can then use it to help anyone really help? Yes, quite obviously, which is why blood banks of any sort exist. If they take it from you and store it for free... it means THEY NEED IT (think regular blood donations, where they sometimes even PAY YOU for your blood). Be even kinder and donate it to somewhere that pays you, but refuse the payment.
If they charge you to store it, it means they don't believe they'll see a way to use most of it so they have to pay for storage in the hopes that "someday" they'll find a use (they are that confident in this, that YOU are the one paying for that) or they're profiteering. This is like those people who cryogenically preserve themselves in the hope that "one day", they'll be a cure for their illness (i.e. death). The cryo companies love it because you don't get any complaining customers and you can take their money and blatantly make a profit on it for decades after their death by having a cold warehouse and doing bugger all.
Does earmarking your own cord blood for use only by yourself and/or relatives and paying thousands for the privilege really help? Probably not. Your own cord blood is in such small amounts that it's of little use on its own, so you'll be either be "mixing" it with others cord blood ("all take and no give" ring a bell?), or a way will be found to multiply your own (so why did you have to be protective of it when it could have been used in other people without affecting your own prospects of storing it?). To quote the article: "donor cord-blood stem cells do not need to be a perfect match to create a successful bone marrow transplant." So if you "earmark" your cord blood for storage for yourself, then you are actually denying it to someone else. Can you live with that knowledge? That someone out there is denied life because you have denied giving blood to them? What if you decide NOT to bank the blood but yet your newborn then needs it... are you going to be righteous and not take anybody else's cord blood either?
Basically, as with all things, if it's in the long-term interests of your health, you'll be able to add to a national blood bank for free (or be paid for it). If you're paying for the "privilege", then you're into a large grey area. Like insurance, the chances are that most of the people who pay will NEVER use it and it'll end up being disposed of, unused. If you're one of the lucky ones that does use it and decided to bank it, it's fantastic, but you are gambling on a long shot with tiny probabilities (unless you know something we don't). It's not nice to talk of "gambling with lives" but we do it everyday. Is it safer to let your child learn to cross the road on their own, or to mollycoddle them and lead them across each day yourself? Obviously, a child is more at risk making their own judgements but the payoff is their independence. Some children *WILL* die because they tried to cross on their own where an adult would know was too dangerous, but you have to weigh things up on larger scales.
In the long run, would that money be better off in a college account, or providing more trips to the park when the child is younger, or buying her a nicer toy at Christmas, or giving her parents some time off one day when she's screaming the house down so they can come back and deal with her refreshed and happy during the critical early years?
I'm a father of a three-month-old girl (the first baby for both me and my wife). I love her to bits and am especially relieved that she's healthy (her mother is a bit of a health-mess, genetically speaking!). I'd much rather stick the money in her Child Trust Fund, or use it to make sure she has a good car seat, or use it to pay for my mother (who occasionally babysits) to stop smoking entirely rather than just "when she's around the baby", or use it to buy her some more bottles so that mummy doesn't have to spend so much time washing th
First statement.... mmmm... not sure about 98's "more features" (USB, possibly - but only because they couldn't be bothered to backport properly to 95 which is why 95 OSR2 only supported certain types of USB? A couple of networking changes?) but it certainly made a difference. Also not sure that I ever noticed any speed change between 95 and 98 at all. Second statement - plain truth. Third statement - you haven't been listening at all....
First off, you've missed out Vista and several others in the game, so that at some points you're comparing consecutive operating systems (95 -> 98) and in some cases you are skipping years of releases (98 -> XP, missing out on ME and 2000 for a start). Windows 7 is almost identical to *Vista*. So your comment: "7 is slower than XP but is more reliable and has more features." is potentially faulty, because you've skipped a generation and missed the point.
Vista is slower than XP. More reliable? Depends on your hardware and architecture and a million other factors (The 1000 users of my last network would have cried in their hands if I'd put Vista onto their myriad different hardwares and pretended that everything ran okay). More features? Yes. More *useful* features? Probably not. This is my point.
Windows 7, though, is a Vista-clone with some of their mistakes rescinded. The performance between Vista and 7 is almost identical except where it's the hardware that makes the difference, not the OS.
"In 8 years they've managed to dramatically increase the number of features while simultaneously only taking a very marginal performance hit. I would say that's an accomplishment."
*Useful* features, or just features? Me changing the clock to have the date in it is a feature. Whether it's useful or not is debatable (however, a *configurable* clock would probably be universally useful) and whether it's worth an OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADE to get is a good question to ask. The performance hit between XP and Vista is, I tell you, quite substantial but the problem is that because we waited so long for anything decent, the hardware overtook us and our computers slipped into the area where XP and Vista can both fly on a modern machine anyway. However, just try running Vista on the same computers that are on the bottom end of the scale for XP usability and it's a different story. "They're old, so who uses them"... businesses, home users, charities, schools. Vista had a hit - a big one - it's just that most people swallowed it. Windows 7, though, does appear to have not made things worse by sticking mostly with Vista-era performance. That's *not* what I expect from a beta where large changes have been made to the underlying OS performance - I expect the beta to SUCK while they debug all their new features... no such luck... it's all the same because they haven't made any big changes to the OS at all. At least Vista could blame some redesigns for it's mistakes and performance hits.
"Usually as the quality of a system improves the speed decreases. More overhead. More code. More stuff to keep track of."
Crap. Quality of an OS does not automatically justify a performance decrease, in fact the opposite. People seem to have been stuck in this (Microsoft-funded) mindset forever. This does *not* mean that I want to run Vista on a 386, but that the performance should decrease only marginally, increase on particularly common workloads and/or stay about the same no matter what new features are added. You'll be telling me next that computers that have had XP on them for more than a year or so start slowing down (they DO NOT if they are properly managed - there's no magic computer-aging fairy that makes a 1GHz run at anything other than 1GHz).
"I could accept that a small performance hit is inevitable when my computer does much much more than it used to and that it's a better experience when not rendering 3D games."
Does it really do "much, much more than it used to", though? This is the question and the answer for 99% of users
So I've got to download, install and test new drivers to make all the hardware that always used to work continue to work, in the process obsoleting quite a lot of perfectly good hardware into the bargain because nobody (read: manufacturers who have financial incentive to release "Vista" versions of the hardware) can be bothered to make a Vista driver. And Vista drivers provide what advantage? Possibly better security with some extremely crap drivers but I haven't seen evidence of that. Significant breakage for zero reward. What do the Vista drivers for my scanners/printers/cameras/graphics card/etc. do that the XP drivers couldn't (ignore DirectX 10 because it's artificially limited to Vista for no reason and not a business case, only personal use)?
"Everybody runs as admin"... wasn't fixed in XP, was made worse in Vista by annoying users so much they saw no choice but to turn it off. On any properly managed network, this wasn't even a problem on 2000, let alone XP or Vista anyway. 64-bit... all of the ten people that run that (those that have drivers that work on x64 as well as Vista) care about that. 90% of MS's customer base don't even know what it is, of the 10% that do, about 0.1% actually use it effectively (i.e. have a use for > 4Gb RAM). Give someone >4Gb of RAM and they either run 32-bit Vista/XP and don't notice, or they get frustrated the very first time they try to download a driver.
All the new bits weren't useful or broke lots of important stuff for no reason. Breaking things on systems that are in millions of businesses is a pretty dumb move if they are no real incentives to suffer the re-testing and re-deployment.
Slashdot Mirror
"surmounting huge odds of occuring at random"
Please explain how you account for a random process surmounting "huge odds" while completely discounting "randomness". Just because there are "huge odds" against it (how huge exactly? How many submerged vessels, in how much ocean, travelling at what speed, for how many years... I'm a maths graduate and I wouldn't like to THINK how complicated the maths behind that could get and I would probably put down money, after a back-of-the-envelope calculation, that it was almost inevitable to have happened within the operational lifespan of a modern sub. Humans are *TERRIBLE* at judging probability... the birthday problem is an example of this) doesn't mean that it's not likely AT SOME POINT, or GIVEN ENOUGH TIME, or even IF THERE ARE A LOT OF SUBS.
Even if the odds ARE huge. So what? Things like that happen. You can't say "we demand an explanation of why the one meterorite that hit Earth the other week landed on top of a nice old lady". The odds are huge but that doesn't mean it's impossible, avoidable, or anything else. What you're suggesting is the equivalent of launching a full-scale investigation based on zero evidence (it wasn't your meteorite, or your granny) with the prejudicial aim of fitting a meteor shield to all old ladies.
The fact is that we have NO idea what happened (which is why the story is a month late), nor will we ever unless the relevant governments decide to declassify it. Even if they were following each other and playing some harmless wargames, so what? That is what they are SUPPOSED to do. I want troops onboard that vessel that CAN follow a French sub for miles without being detected even though France is their ally - it's the sort of thing that you do to boost morale, practice skills and show other countries what you are capable of should they get on your bad side... sneak up behind them and then when they are least suspecting it, give them a loud sonar ping to stir them up a bit.
Some countries won't even tell you how many nuclear subs they actually have, it's such a secret matter. You think that a press campaign based on "these two controlled objects which were both indetectable to each other and probably flying blind and were both moving in roughly the same place collided, so we need to know everything and fit all our nuclear subs with bumpers and flashing lights to prevent a repeat" is going to do ANYTHING?
It's been blown out of all proportion. I don't see anybody complaining about the ex-Russian satellite that obliterated another nation's satellite last week. Maybe we should launch a full-scale investigation on that in a kangaroo court too. It's almost certain that there was nuclear material on both satellites.
Humans do not percieve risk correctly. The subs were relatively unharmed, in fact probably MILES fom being harmed (it would have to be a ten times faster collision, or similar to pose any risk most probably), there was an extremely low risk of anything rupturing to the point that they would sink. If either of them DID sink, it's more likely the war that starts over the political aspects of the sinking kills more people than would EVER be killed by all the nuclear weapons on board both ships (taken over the course of their entire lifetime). If they sank and the weapons spilled - they are allies - they know exactly what that means... back off, apologise, offer assistance in their rescue and don't do ANYTHING that might look like you were trying to steal the weapons. Seal off the area, perform a bog-standard recovery and get on with life. Nothing is going to go boom.
Minor incident, happened before, blown out of all proportion, tabloid headline, ARGH END OF WORLD!, knee-jerk reactions to put in place things that can't POSSIBLY stop anything similar happening in the future.
The bit I find hilarious about every showing of this story that I've seen on the net, is that everyone says "How can this have happened?"
Do *you* want to tell the French where all our nuclear subs are at any moment in time?
Do the French want to tell us where all their nuclear subs are at any moment in time?
Do *you* want to be in a country where all our nuclear subs light up the sonar of any passing ship like a Christmas tree?
No. Therefore, it's an INCREDIBLE show of the power of the anti-detection capabilities of these subs that they BOTH manouvered close enough to each other to collide without EITHER of them detecting the other. That's bloody fantastic. A technology used by the military that actually works in production and has an incredibly relevant use.
As to what happens in a collision... if ANY country in the world truly has nuclear weapons that can be set off without being ARMED first, then we have a bigger problem than what happens if two tiny ships in a vast, three-dimensional ocean might happen to accidentally collide. These things NEED to withstand just about anything, or else the enemy just fires one shot in the right place and "Blam!"... nuclear detonation without ever having owned a nuclear weapon.
Similarly for the onboard reactor. Nuclear subs are not fragile, and their designers not stupid (as has been proved by the anti-sonar technology!)... if a sub is really that easy to sink / destroy and leak radiation enough to matter, then they become nothing more than timebombs. When they next dock for repairs etc. (which cannot really be hidden from satellites, etc.), just blow them up and you've set off a nuclear warhead / contaminated the seas inside your enemies own country.
This is my point. When ordinary communications are intercepted, the governments can only chase their own tails. It's like the Australian ISP filtering - it only needs one ISP not to play ball or one way around it and *everyone* will use it because they can't get the things they are getting today otherwise.
Of course it will be fought, but it won't be long before it's impossible for the government to do / ban anything because it will be impossible to distinguish legitimate traffic from other traffic. You can't ban P2P when your own state TV and radio stations, research projects, etc. rely on being able to connect to random, anonymous peers who share traffic. iPlayer makes up 1/3rd of all UK traffic at your average ISP. Other P2P takes up the majority of the remaining traffic with email / web / other taking up the tiny bit that's left. They can't cut off P2P instantly, therefore it has the opportunity (and the motive and means) to evolve to a place where it cannot be stopped AT ALL. How long before an application comes out that provides another "killer" use of P2P to the average person - free live TV streaming of the expensive sports channels? I know people who would gladly spend thousands of hours to get that working for themselves in place of the legitimate footage on offer (come on, some of the sports channels charge £30/month to view them and then *extra* to view anything vaguely interesting).
And, let's assume the impossible happens, and the government filters all the official channels. That's hefty control that would require world-wide co-ordination and alienate the vast majority of the population (those who weren't brought up with such restrictions). Even in China, people get onto the "real" web and bypass filters. What happens then is that official Internet transit lines become no-go areas. Wireless takes over and you'll get people building, selling, and setting up mesh networking. Even if it's just national, rather than international, there's still a massive impetus to provide communications to everybody anonymously. You'll have people stringing together their *own* Internet (that is, after all, all it is in the first place) and because the anonymous, secure, protocols run *on top* of this, you won't even notice the difference. It might be a bit slower, but then, depending on your current end-point, it might be a lot faster (e.g. 54MBps to a well-connected neighbour vs 512Kbps to an ISP at the other end of the country).
The point is that it's the social element that will kill attempts to filter the Internet in countries that have an established history of being able to access it unfiltered. The Internet is nothing more than a collection of networks, not the "Internet" people are used to (i.e. has to connect over a well-known backend provider via a large commercial entity to another country), and as soon as people realise that even Joe down the road has something they might want, it can be a matter of hours before people are meshing their networks together with their friends, their friend's friends and so on. Even if you just use the mesh for P2P to share music and the "filtered" Internet for general stuff, it's still taken a massive hold on your life and then if someone comes up with a way to show you the unfiltered Internet for free on your P2P/mesh network, what is the first thing you will do? Abandon the "normal" Internet. (P2P melds well in concept with meshing because you don't need to know an explicit route to the endpoint, or well-defined numbering schemes, and you're prepared to pass on a lot of other people's traffic in order to get that tiny bit of vital traffic that you've been hunting for for years).
Again, there's always a weak link in controlling such a scheme - it only needs ONE of those people to have a connection to ONE other place that connects to an unfiltered Internet to render the whole connection "open" and "uncensored". Before that, though, it's the P2P content-sharing that will make it popular - after all, this works better the more peopl
Shut it down. It won't make any difference.
It will force coders to create a better system.
It will promote the use of another protocol/network that is immune to particular traits of law/jurisdiction that The Pirate Bay may fall foul of.
In the meantime, hundreds of pretenders will show up to take the flak and the sheer volume means that all that can be done is trying to shut them down one at a time with legal threats.
Just look at the history of ANY P2P system and it's pretty much identical.
Give it a few more years, the Internet will be nothing but the basis of a global, anonymous, reliable, authenticatable P2P system that everybody uses to do everything. We have the technology (Tor, CloudVPN, Bittorrent, DHT, etc.), it's just a matter of fine-tuning and prevelance. As an additional bonus, it then won't matter that some people are using IPv6 and some IPv4 - everything will be in this cloud of dark smoke that you can only see what enters and leaves and nothing inbetween. You'll be able to tell that User X shared an MP3 if you are able to see all of User X's traffic. You'll be able to see that User Y downloaded an MP3 if you are able to see all of User Y's traffic. But even compromising User X completely won't reveal to you who User Y is or was. Trying to masquerade as User X without their private key would be useless, so the best you could do (even with the key) would be to propogate false content to... who? Nobody would know - everything is just an anonymous connection from a dozen random peers.
The media companies and governments are, by a process of digital evolution, driving anonymous communications into necessities and they become more prevelant with each generation. Hardly anybody warezed back in the 90's as a percentage of Internet users - now most ordinary people know how to find and download illegal content in a few clicks. Each time the problem of "piracy" is "fixed", it crops up yet again, somewhere else, in a new form that's more convenient, faster, harder to prove and more ubiquitous.
Even in terms of general users - the only things that people ever ask me about when the subject comes up are "something like Napster or something". They've never used Napster but the fame of being shut down was enough to make them into a household name for free/illegal content. Do it to The Pirate Bay (whose name I'm already getting mentioned in conversations from people who I thought couldn't work a mouse) and the same will happen.
It doesn't mean that they *shouldn't* be shutting down The Pirate Bay, or that The Pirate Bay are somehow "right" or "heroes". They have taken advantage of an interesting legal technicality. It just means that you're not going to win with the sorts of tactics where you just try and shut the sites down. Maybe the opportunity for the media companies EVER winning has now passed and they'll never be able to anymore - who knows? But they are trying to catch fog in a net... this isn't a problem they can solve by shutting down a server - they need something else. I don't know what. They certainly don't. But until it exists, they are playing a losing game.
Oh, by the way, I converted/ported/maintain an SDL port of Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection to the GP2X. I know *exactly* the problem you are talking about. I end up fixing what people see as problems myself, because it's hard to get code to go upstream and a lot of my user's problems are related to the nature of the port (running on a device without a mouse or keyboard, just a joystick, for example). I've had to tweak several games to make sure they don't do stupid things and work around a lot of "PC-isms" in the code just to satisfy my users.
I've had tons of users come to me and ask if I can put in "interruptible generation" (that is, being able to cancel a puzzle if it's taking too long to generate one). All of the 31 puzzles in my version of the collection (including some of my own making and some I found in other places) are generated dynamically by some of the most complex code I've had to play with. To just *stop* this single-threaded, C-based, dynamically-allocated-memory code that can easily run for hours on even the most powerful machine if you put in silly numbers, when it's running on an embedded processor with 32Mb RAM and a 200MHz CPU, and to stop it in a way that the overseeing threads can recover and continue at a convenient point means understanding the entire puzzle generator (and therefore the puzzle itself, plus a lot of game theory and programming logic) and solver. Just so that when an idiot user builds a stupidly large puzzle (which will probably run out of memory within the first few moves anyway) they don't have to reset their GP2X (which takes about 5 seconds and teaches them not to do it again).
The other requests I had included lots of reasonable requests, which I tried to take account of as much as I possibly could, but I still haven't made this one practical without understanding every puzzle I touch. It took me several months to track down a stupid crash problem with the Minesweeper code (I mean, come on, it's minesweeper! I was writing minesweeper games ten years ago on my TI-85 graphical calculator), because the code was so complex I couldn't follow it even in a debugger line-by-line. Turned out to be a faulty library providing an inadequate version of memset, but it took the original author of the puzzle, some ARM disassembly and a lot of work to spot that! Users don't care though - as far as they are concerned "that port crashes". Nothing to do with whether it's my fault, or a problem upstream, or a faulty library, or code that's virtually inaccessible without months of study - it just "doesn't work" and they want it fixed.
You have to do your best to meet their expectations - they are the driver. You're just a code-monkey that does it for fun! :-)
There's nothing worse than a developer who refuses to listen to his users. It annoys me, greatly. You don't have to concede everything (otherwise you'd end up with the Turbo-Hyper-Fighting edition where they can play multiplayer across the Internet with Mario, based on real-time data sucked from their personal Facebook account, etc.) but you do have to listen.
If *several* users are saying that the hint button would be valuable, then to those users, it *would* be valuable. You can make it optional (i.e. a "Hard" difficulty where you can't use the hint button) and so not alienate established users who don't *want* to use it. You can make it so they have to "earn" a hint powerup. You can make it so that they can't submit their scores online if they have used hints, and so on.
I tend to find that "make it optional" is a cure-all for the vast majority of problems like this.
Additionally, this is the problem I have with 99% of computer game sequels - the players say for years how good it would be to finally do X in the game and the sequel totally ignores the possibility. Often, you then find people patching the original to do X in place of buying the sequel. The GTA series is a big example of this - MultiTheftAuto would have been infinitely popular if it was tied into the games that it was available for, but nobody ever bothered (despite even the original GTA having integrated multiplayer). Suddenly, with GTA 4 - Hmm, let's put some multiplayer back in.
The users are your BEST source of ideas... you will dry up for ideas after a while. You won't play the games anywhere near as much as they do (honestly!). Their collective testing power vastly outweighs anything even the biggest company can afford to do. This is how the best stuff appears - this is how Valve works, for example - release a game that's easily moddable, let people mod it, buy the mods, sell them back to the users. It happened with Quake, too. Quake multiplayer gets dull quickly but being able to load up new user-created content from *their* ideas, even if it's thing that you never wanted implemented, are what keeps the game fresh, interesting and popular.
Listen to your users. Yeah, it's a pain to filter out the crap. Yeah, it's disheartening that people get more excited over a hint button and anti-aliased fonts than your super-duper complicated solve system. But at the end of the day, these are the people that make programming worthwhile - would you have carried on making the game if your websites/distributors said that nobody had downloaded it?
The reality is closer to this:
Bugger! People don't want to pay £15 to sit for hours in a dirty, smelly, sticky cinema to watch disgusting, blurry, washed-out reproductions of Hollywood movies that take twenty minutes to start (while accusing them of everything from theft to supporting terrorism), where a hot dog costs more than the ticket, the drinks are 99.999% water and the staff are similarly dirty, smelly and sticky.
The madmen would rather sit at home in comfort with their HDTV's and get a better quality image close up! What are they thinking?!
Hey, we need to get our customers back, so let's add a useless 3D element to our movies that everybody has been able to do but nobody has cared about in the last fifty years!
Seriously, the last four or five times I went into a cinema in a large town not 10 minutes from London, there were about three people in there, including me. They need a new gimmick and they think it will bring back the audiences. It won't. The problem isn't the type of movie projection - it's the quality of the systems (all the films I've seen this year have been blurry, out of focus and even when in focus look very horrible), the atmosphere of the cinema (which is all-but-gone now), the service recieved and the price you pay. I can OWN a copy of a film cheaper than I can go to the cinema once, and it will "appear" better quality because I'm closer to a higher-quality screen. Plus, I can pause it to get a real hotdog, or I can invite friends over.
Email the webmaster, perhaps? Or just ask?
Yes, and still people don't listen. What's the incentive to visit a website that a) doesn't work itself or that b) the majority of its content is links to websites that don't work?
People should be CHECKING these things because, as you rightly point out, 10 years is a long time to keep giving the same hints. Every time SlashDot does something stupid, I'm less and less keen to use it. Linking to a broken link (caused, in no small part, by not checking that the link works or is capable of handling the traffic) is stupid. It won't be working for DAYS now, by which time I won't want to see it. In fact, all this has made me do is go *elsewhere* to find a link. Hopefully, if enough people realise that it's actually a problem, it will be fixed. This is better than your solution which appears to be "That's what we do here... link to broken stuff... get over it".
Not only slashdot'ted, but super-slashdot'ted. I can't even get a byte back from them. And coral cache has similar problems.
Hint, in case this hasn't already occurred to people: DO NOT LINK TO A WEBSITE THAT CAN'T HANDLE TRAFFIC. Seriously, I don't think a single poster here has managed to actually see the screenshots at all.
This is the problem with heavily-dynamic websites - a few visitors and you need to add extra servers. At least with static content, you can serve up to the capacity of your internet connection.
In other words... we don't want anybody to buy our cheapest product, so we'll enforce a ludicrous restriction never used in any other OS or software company before, with some statistical justification in the hopes that people will "think" we offer cheap products but still buy the expensive ones which are virtually identical but have a one-bit flag difference between them.
The average user might only use one or two "apps" but it's the definition of apps that's the problem. Apparently AV isn't an app, by this definition. But a firewall might be. A utility to check your startup entries might be. What about the Adobe Reader Speed Launcher, is that an app? Notepad? This is the problem - they are drawing a boundary where it doesn't make ANY sense to anybody. To users, their startup entries are not apps. But to the professional, a startup entry which works around the app limit could well be the downfall of the entire system that could allow companies or charities to save money by buying the cheaper Starter editions.
They are trying to introduce an artificial limitation based on the intended use, rather than just targetting the intended use - cheap, compatible, standard, available for home use. Instead, they want you to "think" that somebody actually buys that crap and that you are a "power user" because you have more than three apps open, thus leading you to believe that you have to buy a "more powerful" operating system for more money.
It's crap. Nobody will buy it, like nobody bought the other starter editions... because it's an artificial limitation for no good, technical reason.
I'm not a fire expert by any means but several things really annoyed me about the video linked to on the BBC article. Mostly about the realism of the situation and several to do with "training" people to do things correctly.
First - WHY DON'T THEY SHUT THE DOORS THAT LEAD TO A FIRE... chances are opening those doors where a fire was on the other side would probably have killed you quite quickly anyway, but for God's sake, SHUT THE DOOR, if you're not going that way to reduce the available oxygen. It's an FPS engine so you should be penalising people for not shutting the damn fire-doors after them.
Second - Why are the doors just "flung" open without checking - what happened to all the training I had as a child to put the back of my hand on the door, open it slowly etc. in case the fire was on the other side of the door I'm opening. You have an FPS engine, this should have been put in as your only "weapon".
Third - Why were there fires on metal stairs, and why only halfway up the staircase and WHY, when going into a stairwell which is obviously on fire within mere feet of the "down" stairs, do they continue to use the stairwell to go down? Abandon the attempt and back off if you don't want to die.
Fourth - No smoke. Fill the burning rooms with smoke, so that you can only just see the exit signs or, indeed, the fire. Much more realistic and useful (I can find my out of any building in broad daylight - that's not the problem you're testing here).
Fifth - That CS department modelled is really crap in terms of signposting the fire exits and I only saw one fire extinguisher on the entire three floors the character went through (though I might have missed one because it only occurred to me halfway through that I didn't rememeber seeing one). Stop making simulations and sort the real situation out if that model is any reflection on the actual physical location.
Sixth-form students (now called Year 13's) being taught how to program by someone who would literally read one page in front each lesson to prepare for the next from a outdated textbook. They were actually physics or maths teachers, mostly, who hadn't even used a programming language like FORTRAN or BASIC back in their studies (one claimed to have used a punch-card system for "something" back in university, but couldn't remember anything about it).
They also "taught" other teachers how to run the course for their Year 13's. The course language? I've seen this happen with BBC BASIC (back when I was being taught - yes, I was taught BBC BASIC in Year 13 by someone who'd never used it, and couldn't do anything that didn't have a direct example in their textbook, at the same time as I was learning to convert my knowledge of FORTRAN, Pascal, etc. towards C and the more modern languages.), Java, Visual Basic, and even "Excel". Yes, I was a witness to a *programming* course taught using Excel's VBScript-macro-language. I kid you not. The kids did a surprisingly good job of making a bunch of games using just Excel.
Now imagine that these people don't understand the basic concepts of programming (variable types, loops, etc.) and towards the end of the course have to support 30 students, all making different types of programs from scratch, and have nothing but a twenty-year-old textbook to refer to. Guess who ends up fixing all the kids courseworks, being dragged into every problem and even (in the BBC BASIC example) *students* taking the bloody class while the teacher hastily jotted down notes on what the students were teaching.
"that once EVERYONE has one of these [Access points], [WEP] will be cracked sufficiently and we'll be back to square one but tied into millions of devices incorporating a useless and obsolete security "standard""
I don't see how that's drivel or a poor reflection of the WEP situation, it being the shit-heap of an encryption standard that it was. Introduced in 1997, cracked to hell by 2001 - I've had computers that have gone longer than that between reboots. So just as it was put in products, standardised and people were using it, it was a waste of time. And if WEP had incorporated the capacity to negotiate encryption algorithms (like every decent cryptography-based standard out there), it wouldn't have been a problem (WEP cracked? change the underlying encryption / integrity check / number of rounds). I'm not saying that anyone KNEW it was vulnerable when it was published as a standard, but they did know that just about every algorithm gets cracked before long and they should have had a bit more foresight in their standard. In the end, they had to deprecate the standard, prevent it's use in anything serious and propose an alternative standard (requiring alternative hardware, because the replacement that was meant to be used on the same hardware [WPA] has also been similarly reduced to worthless now).
I call it the "Base unit". Even the people who never touch computers can deal with that terminology. "Computer" = "Base unit" + "Monitor" + "Keyboard" + etc.
Would you like to explain how you teach other teachers to teach children IT when you yourself know nothing about it, the people below you know even less?
This "a good teacher can teach anything" is a bit of a fallacy. Sure, I can talk my walk through a hour of stuff I don't understand, but it doesn't mean I'm teaching. I can even make the kids "understand" it. It doesn't mean that what I'm teaching them helps them any.
I had a teacher who tried to teach me BBC BASIC back in the day and had never programmed. I ended up taking the class because nobody could understand what he was waffling on about. Everyone else just thought he was incoherent or a poor teacher, when in fact he knew NOTHING and the little he did state with certainty was wrong.
+1 Telling the bloody truth like it is.
How short-sighted is it to tie into one encryption standard? Idiots.
You need to *at least* make various encryptions pluggable and software-upgradeable because I guarantee that Murphy's Law says that once EVERYONE has one of these hard drive, AES will be cracked sufficiently and we'll be back to square one but tied into millions of devices incorporating a useless and obsolete security "standard. It'll be WEP all over again, even down to 99% of people being "assured" that their hard drive is safe, and then finding out the reality.
Plus, the DRM potential is obvious. I thought the ATA standard had the facility to implement disk encryption anyway - isn't that one of the features used on the XBox or something to lock the hard drives to a particular machine? - you have to send a password across the bus as an ATA packet before the drive will permit any access at all.
You must be new around schools... :-)
I've worked with "Head of IT" Teachers who can't install a simple application and don't understand "read-only" attributes.
I've worked with IT teachers who teach that the main components of a PC are a monitor and a hard drive "which contains all the other bits of the computer, including the CDROM".
I've worked with IT teachers who have NEVER programmed a single line in their life, trying to teach people how to use a programming language.
I've worked with IT teachers who are reluctant to let go of their floppies because they can't handle USB drives.
I've worked with IT teachers who have *zero* concept of licensing and just install everything everywhere.
Unfortunately, I met most of those people while working at a specialist IT secondary school / Academy.
It's common to most schools and to most subjects and even to most teachers - they might have a *related* degree (i.e. maths teachers with physics backgrounds, or even IT teachers with "business" backgrounds) or an actual degree in their subject but it doesn't mean that they understand the most fundamental things they are supposed to be teaching.
There are exceptions, as always, but it's true for the vast majority. At one point, I was tempted to do the extra 1 year PGCE in the UK in order to go back into those schools and show people that, actually, a network manager can do their job in a trice, but they can't hold a stick to a good network manager. Unfortunately, it would mean having to come down to their level for that entire year and I'm not sure I could manage it without pissing myself laughing.
I'll ask you too, just to get a straw poll going here:
Have you ever suffered from appendicitis or had your appendix removed? If so, was this before or after this incident?
I wonder, then, if this was a factor. If you had an appendix, the current theory goes, then it would contain and isolate some of those gut flora that existed before you got ill. Thus, when you were ill enough to have to re-populate the gut, the appendix would have re-populated it with the same (or similar, or a subset of your original) flora.
It's being touted only as a possibility but in completely unscientific, anecdotal evidence, the few people I have heard of with similar complaints had their appendix removed at some point prior to the problem.
It's a touchy subject and it depends on your beliefs and how you go about doing it.
Does donating cord blood to a public entity that can then use it to help anyone really help? Yes, quite obviously, which is why blood banks of any sort exist. If they take it from you and store it for free... it means THEY NEED IT (think regular blood donations, where they sometimes even PAY YOU for your blood). Be even kinder and donate it to somewhere that pays you, but refuse the payment.
If they charge you to store it, it means they don't believe they'll see a way to use most of it so they have to pay for storage in the hopes that "someday" they'll find a use (they are that confident in this, that YOU are the one paying for that) or they're profiteering. This is like those people who cryogenically preserve themselves in the hope that "one day", they'll be a cure for their illness (i.e. death). The cryo companies love it because you don't get any complaining customers and you can take their money and blatantly make a profit on it for decades after their death by having a cold warehouse and doing bugger all.
Does earmarking your own cord blood for use only by yourself and/or relatives and paying thousands for the privilege really help? Probably not. Your own cord blood is in such small amounts that it's of little use on its own, so you'll be either be "mixing" it with others cord blood ("all take and no give" ring a bell?), or a way will be found to multiply your own (so why did you have to be protective of it when it could have been used in other people without affecting your own prospects of storing it?). To quote the article: "donor cord-blood stem cells do not need to be a perfect match to create a successful bone marrow transplant." So if you "earmark" your cord blood for storage for yourself, then you are actually denying it to someone else. Can you live with that knowledge? That someone out there is denied life because you have denied giving blood to them? What if you decide NOT to bank the blood but yet your newborn then needs it... are you going to be righteous and not take anybody else's cord blood either?
Basically, as with all things, if it's in the long-term interests of your health, you'll be able to add to a national blood bank for free (or be paid for it). If you're paying for the "privilege", then you're into a large grey area. Like insurance, the chances are that most of the people who pay will NEVER use it and it'll end up being disposed of, unused. If you're one of the lucky ones that does use it and decided to bank it, it's fantastic, but you are gambling on a long shot with tiny probabilities (unless you know something we don't). It's not nice to talk of "gambling with lives" but we do it everyday. Is it safer to let your child learn to cross the road on their own, or to mollycoddle them and lead them across each day yourself? Obviously, a child is more at risk making their own judgements but the payoff is their independence. Some children *WILL* die because they tried to cross on their own where an adult would know was too dangerous, but you have to weigh things up on larger scales.
In the long run, would that money be better off in a college account, or providing more trips to the park when the child is younger, or buying her a nicer toy at Christmas, or giving her parents some time off one day when she's screaming the house down so they can come back and deal with her refreshed and happy during the critical early years?
I'm a father of a three-month-old girl (the first baby for both me and my wife). I love her to bits and am especially relieved that she's healthy (her mother is a bit of a health-mess, genetically speaking!). I'd much rather stick the money in her Child Trust Fund, or use it to make sure she has a good car seat, or use it to pay for my mother (who occasionally babysits) to stop smoking entirely rather than just "when she's around the baby", or use it to buy her some more bottles so that mummy doesn't have to spend so much time washing th
First statement.... mmmm... not sure about 98's "more features" (USB, possibly - but only because they couldn't be bothered to backport properly to 95 which is why 95 OSR2 only supported certain types of USB? A couple of networking changes?) but it certainly made a difference. Also not sure that I ever noticed any speed change between 95 and 98 at all.
Second statement - plain truth.
Third statement - you haven't been listening at all....
First off, you've missed out Vista and several others in the game, so that at some points you're comparing consecutive operating systems (95 -> 98) and in some cases you are skipping years of releases (98 -> XP, missing out on ME and 2000 for a start). Windows 7 is almost identical to *Vista*. So your comment: "7 is slower than XP but is more reliable and has more features." is potentially faulty, because you've skipped a generation and missed the point.
Vista is slower than XP. More reliable? Depends on your hardware and architecture and a million other factors (The 1000 users of my last network would have cried in their hands if I'd put Vista onto their myriad different hardwares and pretended that everything ran okay). More features? Yes. More *useful* features? Probably not. This is my point.
Windows 7, though, is a Vista-clone with some of their mistakes rescinded. The performance between Vista and 7 is almost identical except where it's the hardware that makes the difference, not the OS.
"In 8 years they've managed to dramatically increase the number of features while simultaneously only taking a very marginal performance hit. I would say that's an accomplishment."
*Useful* features, or just features? Me changing the clock to have the date in it is a feature. Whether it's useful or not is debatable (however, a *configurable* clock would probably be universally useful) and whether it's worth an OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADE to get is a good question to ask. The performance hit between XP and Vista is, I tell you, quite substantial but the problem is that because we waited so long for anything decent, the hardware overtook us and our computers slipped into the area where XP and Vista can both fly on a modern machine anyway. However, just try running Vista on the same computers that are on the bottom end of the scale for XP usability and it's a different story. "They're old, so who uses them"... businesses, home users, charities, schools. Vista had a hit - a big one - it's just that most people swallowed it. Windows 7, though, does appear to have not made things worse by sticking mostly with Vista-era performance. That's *not* what I expect from a beta where large changes have been made to the underlying OS performance - I expect the beta to SUCK while they debug all their new features... no such luck... it's all the same because they haven't made any big changes to the OS at all. At least Vista could blame some redesigns for it's mistakes and performance hits.
"Usually as the quality of a system improves the speed decreases. More overhead. More code. More stuff to keep track of."
Crap. Quality of an OS does not automatically justify a performance decrease, in fact the opposite. People seem to have been stuck in this (Microsoft-funded) mindset forever. This does *not* mean that I want to run Vista on a 386, but that the performance should decrease only marginally, increase on particularly common workloads and/or stay about the same no matter what new features are added. You'll be telling me next that computers that have had XP on them for more than a year or so start slowing down (they DO NOT if they are properly managed - there's no magic computer-aging fairy that makes a 1GHz run at anything other than 1GHz).
"I could accept that a small performance hit is inevitable when my computer does much much more than it used to and that it's a better experience when not rendering 3D games."
Does it really do "much, much more than it used to", though? This is the question and the answer for 99% of users
Just as a query: Have you ever suffered from appendicitis?
Current theory has it that the appendix is used to "reboot" the gut flora after illness.
So I've got to download, install and test new drivers to make all the hardware that always used to work continue to work, in the process obsoleting quite a lot of perfectly good hardware into the bargain because nobody (read: manufacturers who have financial incentive to release "Vista" versions of the hardware) can be bothered to make a Vista driver. And Vista drivers provide what advantage? Possibly better security with some extremely crap drivers but I haven't seen evidence of that. Significant breakage for zero reward. What do the Vista drivers for my scanners/printers/cameras/graphics card/etc. do that the XP drivers couldn't (ignore DirectX 10 because it's artificially limited to Vista for no reason and not a business case, only personal use)?
"Everybody runs as admin"... wasn't fixed in XP, was made worse in Vista by annoying users so much they saw no choice but to turn it off. On any properly managed network, this wasn't even a problem on 2000, let alone XP or Vista anyway. 64-bit... all of the ten people that run that (those that have drivers that work on x64 as well as Vista) care about that. 90% of MS's customer base don't even know what it is, of the 10% that do, about 0.1% actually use it effectively (i.e. have a use for > 4Gb RAM). Give someone >4Gb of RAM and they either run 32-bit Vista/XP and don't notice, or they get frustrated the very first time they try to download a driver.
All the new bits weren't useful or broke lots of important stuff for no reason. Breaking things on systems that are in millions of businesses is a pretty dumb move if they are no real incentives to suffer the re-testing and re-deployment.