I spent the last decade in a job with a nice Herman Miller Aeron chair.
LOL, honest question... was your company the original purchasers of them, or did they buy them from one of the many sales of such things after the.com era?
My understanding is that in San Francisco for a while you could buy them in lots of 100 for about 10% of the original price. They literally became the symbol of companies which were spending lavishly but weren't going to last very long, because they were being bought as status symbols. (Not that I'm dissing the chair, which is pretty awesome.)
Happy employees stay longer, work longer, and refer other good potential employees.
Does pretty network trays count towards that?
Yes, ergonomics and usable workstations are good. The fancy network stuff being asked here sounds like window dressing which is being given more priority than functionality.
No, I have a stunning lack of trust in retailers and analytics companies.
I simply refuse to provide them with data to make money from me when I don't need to.
Free wi-fi in stores so they can track what you do and come up with more analytics? No thanks. I don't need their wi-fi that badly, and don't especially care that they have better marketing information.
You are free to choose to do whatever the hell you like. Me, I choose to exercise my choice by denying them information that I don't need to provide them to finish a transaction.
So when the sales clerk asks for my zip code or my phone number or anything else they don't legally need, I just look at them and say "nope". If they occasionally insist (because they're idiots who have been coached to say they 'need' it), I will simply walk away from the cash register.
I provide myself with precisely the functionality I require, which is plenty good for me.
I can go without checking my email while I'm shopping. In fact, I've been known to go an entire day without using the interwebs -- because I understand that it's just a tool, and not actually vital every moment of the day.
And, from what I can tell, mobile internet on a phone is more than I'm willing to spend, and is mostly just a way to see even more ads and crap like that. Or, apparently provide tracking information to retailers.
Every last site on the internet already connects to Facebook and Google and every other "social" service already.
Privacy extensions like Ghostery and NoScript are your friend.
I've got Google and Facebook blocked wherever I can. I'm not here to provide them with information about what I do on the internet. Some things are blocked at the firewall, and simply can't be resolved in my house.
Why do states wish to entrench a specific business model or exclude someone from it? What does it have to do with them?
What next, banning all forms of on-line shopping to prop up the brick and mortar stores?
This just sounds like more irrational pandering to protect existing business interests -- which isn't really what legislatures should be doing (but do anyway).
My lame company only prides itself on stupid shit like making good products and pleasing its customers.
Yeah, but these are Hipster Companies, where the design aesthetic of the network trays is far more important.
I'm betting there's an awful lot of pretentious sense of how awesome they are, equipped with turtle-necks and the ability to win buzzword bingo by 9am every day.
This makes me think of those Herman Miller chairs, which became the symbol of the.com era -- if your company had them, it was likely going out of business soon.:-P
Me, I'm looking at a request for beautiful networking trays to be indicative of a company more focused on style than function.
And, in my experience, most companies are only worried about making a good enough product that meets the deadlines, and only somewhat worried about happy customers as long as it isn't below a certain threshold.
I don't think any of the above examples are legally fraud.
And you can bet that Oracle has lawyers ensuring they never actually meet the legal definition of fraud, and that the contracts have enough wiggle room to cover their asses.
But, I can also tell you that it's entirely common for companies contracting for this kind of thing to start off with the full knowledge that they've not asked for enough money to cover everything and get you a working system -- instead they rely on having to do changes and enhancements on a time and materials basis. And then they make a small fortune in quibbling over every little change.
I've seen several of these kinds of things where the contractors essentially knew there was no way to deliver the system on-time and on-budget. They just seem to build in the fact that once the client realizes it, the sunk cost is high enough they get to have a gravy train for some time to come.
It's not fraud, per se, but it's carefully managing the terms of your engagement with the knowledge the customer will end having to pay more and not really have much of a choice.
Sadly, it almost seems to be standard practice in the industry.
What kind of technology would be required to confirm the presence of life visually?
If you'd asked anybody that 25 years ago they'd laugh and say it's impossible. My first thought is it still might be, but the jumps they've made in imaging over the last few decades are staggering. Now you can get as good resolution from ground-based telescopes as the ones in space, because the image processing has gotten so much better.
It would be quite a feat to directly image life on a planet over vast distances and through atmospheres, so my complete and total guess is unless they've got something really large and obvious like city lights, we probably can't.
Could we ever "verify" that there was life on that planet without going there or sending a probe (which is currently not feasible)?
I can't speculate how, but I'm not an astro-physicist (or a physicists for that matter)... for all I know some of the boffins are trying to figure out how they'd go about this. It certainly would be one hell of a feat.
When I was in university and hung out with astrophysicists, the notion of detecting an exoplanet was still a bit of a stretch. Since then, we've inferred or directly observed so many it's astounding.
Oracle has reportedly informed the state that it will sort out the bulk of technical issues by December 16, a day after those paper applications are due.
No matter what you do, you will find yourself in this same position with Oracle.
I've had the misfortune of using their collaboration platform, which despite their claims to the contrary, was essentially a beta product that even they didn't know how to set up and configure.
My experience with Oracle is they consistently over-promise, under-deliver, and over-charge.
I think the threshold for 'strong' evidence will be in doubt for some time.
Yes, if we see a lot of oxygen we might conclude it's possibly/probably life.
But, the universe conspires to show us new and exotic things we can't quite figure out all the time -- if there's vast clouds of alcohol floating about in space, I think until we're actually directly looking at/talking with something, we'll only ever suspect there could be life.
If they're unconcerned with spying on citizens of other countries on this planet, they're definitely not going to give a damn about those on other planets.
Well, Clarkson et al may be buffoons (and fully aware of it).
But they have driven a tremendous amount of cars under many different circumstances. Usually when they're saying "this is available with even more horses, but we have no idea of why you would" I take that to mean "holy crap is this thing ridiculous".
At a certain point, the 'big penis' cars become something which pretty much require 100% driver attention and focus 100% of the time. And, many of us look at such cars and think to ourselves "even if I had the money, I am nowhere near qualified to operate that thing". I suspect that car would scare the bejeezus out of me in first gear, and if it scared Clarkson, I know damned well I have no business trying it.
Shame really, used to be I would recommend whichever system allowed them the most freedom.
I've always found when giving this advice to non-technical folks it was better to focus on what they needed, and leave my politics the hell out of it.
My mother in law expressed interest in a tablet over the last year. So, I did a little digging and decided on the Nexus 7 for her -- after I bought one for myself.
Mine, I went through, disabled or uninstalled stuff, locked down what I could, added ad blockers, and generally tuned it for my needs. For her, because she doesn't want to fiddle with these things -- I set her up in the Google landscape and left her with a tablet which worked and which she won't have to really worry about wrestling with or having to know what works and what doesn't (or what magic is involved in making it work).
She's happy with hers, and I'm happy with mine. But the last thing I wanted to do was start telling her about privacy and internet tracking and the like -- because it's a waste of time, and she doesn't really care. She's far more interested in something which just works than the politics behind it (which would only make the experience with the technology even worse for her).
I've just learned to bite my tongue about all of the scary geeky things that some people really would rather not deal with. Because my web browsers on my PCs are so locked down some sites don't really work, because I've blocked so many things and don't care to find out what to unblock to make it work. The last thing I need is the mother in law bitching about stuff like that to me.
Big deal then. Cameras with flashes have been taking photos in the dark for years
Not at this level of sensitivity.
It's like land speed records -- sure, cars have been going 'fast' for a long time too, but not as fast as the last guy to set the record.
And, in case you've not read TFA...
The achievement is likely to support studies of fragile biological materials, such as the human eye, that could be damaged or destroyed by higher levels of illumination. The development could also have applications for military surveillance, such as in a spy camera that records a scene with a minimum of illumination to elude detection.
So, from a medical perspective we can do some stuff which would be otherwise damaged. From a military perspective instead of a big honking light to let people know you're there, you can do it more covertly. I suspect it would also be useful in a lot of other places -- inside mines for example, or search and rescue type stuff in buildings.
What have you done this week besides bitching on Slashdot? If it isn't scientific progress, get over your bad-assed self and stop treating it all like it's been done before.
In all seriouisness, I don't see how this relates to real-world data-gathering.
Except, it says it right there in the summary:
The research isn't entirely frivolous. The researchers say exactly the same process of model-building, data gathering and simulation works equally well on real diseases such as influenza. So their approach is a useful teaching tool for budding epidemiologists of the future.
In other words, while the subject matter is somewhat silly from a real-world perspective, modelling the epidemiology and the like is still sound.
All you really need to be doing is modelling something based on definable parameters (which become the variables you tweak to see how badly it hits everyone).
Short of making up a notional disease, assigning characteristics to it, and going from there -- it seems like picking one that most people can understand but which still gives you valid modelling would be an entirely reasonable approach.
And, really, there's probably more interest in their work now than if it had been on something else. In which case, more people will read it, comment on it, and then refine it. And that, oddly enough, is how we do science for the most part.
And this 'current zombie obsession' has more or less been happening in film since at least the 40's.
And as to why this would be more loathsome and tiresome than superhero movies, car chase movies, Disney movies or any other genre of film -- I have no idea.
It's a form of entertainment, some people like it, some people won't. The rest is mostly irrelevant.
but I haven't really been able to find any concise information on how to set up a personal cloud
You mean a computer? A server farm? A beowulf cluster?
To me, 'personal cloud' is a totally meaningless term and doesn't correspond to what the cloud is. If it's a couple of servers you own and control, to me that doesn't sound like 'cloud computing' -- it sounds like a marketing term.
not only did they use cancer-prone rats like it says in the summary
Well, if rats are unsuitable test subjects, might I suggest lawyers, politicians, telemarketers and door-to-door sales people?
Cram a couple of pounds of GMO crap down their gullet every day and see what happens. And, Fox could syndicate it and make a fortune. Think of the boost to the economy.
Funny how Monsanto isn't required to definitively prove their crap is safe, but everyone else is required to definitely prove that it isn't.
So basically we've got an evidentiary double-standard where Monsanto et al get to say "perfectly safe until proven otherwise", and we don't get to say "prove it". And then we all get to be the test subjects in the long-term studies.
And, more importantly, having worked at Monsanto should automatically exclude you from being considered from holding an editorial position like this. You mostly have to assume these guys are going to be paid shills who have already made up their mind that it's safe, and he's basically just demonstrated that Food and Chemical Toxicology isn't interested in objective science.
If anything, I'd mistrust the people who make a big deal about never looking at internet porn. Just look at the frequent revelations involving vocal evangelists.
In general, I've come to the conclusion the louder someone screeches about the morality of other people, the higher the likelihood they'll get caught in a scandal.
Which has more or less confirmed for me that people are lying douchebags, who mostly want to point the finger at everyone else.
The more rigid and extreme the position, the more they're full of shit.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL, honest question ... was your company the original purchasers of them, or did they buy them from one of the many sales of such things after the .com era?
My understanding is that in San Francisco for a while you could buy them in lots of 100 for about 10% of the original price. They literally became the symbol of companies which were spending lavishly but weren't going to last very long, because they were being bought as status symbols. (Not that I'm dissing the chair, which is pretty awesome.)
Does pretty network trays count towards that?
Yes, ergonomics and usable workstations are good. The fancy network stuff being asked here sounds like window dressing which is being given more priority than functionality.
Oh, I don't know ... the odd boost up a hill or extending how far you can travel makes sense.
Not everyone needs this, but I can see it being very useful for some people.
No, I have a stunning lack of trust in retailers and analytics companies.
I simply refuse to provide them with data to make money from me when I don't need to.
Free wi-fi in stores so they can track what you do and come up with more analytics? No thanks. I don't need their wi-fi that badly, and don't especially care that they have better marketing information.
You are free to choose to do whatever the hell you like. Me, I choose to exercise my choice by denying them information that I don't need to provide them to finish a transaction.
So when the sales clerk asks for my zip code or my phone number or anything else they don't legally need, I just look at them and say "nope". If they occasionally insist (because they're idiots who have been coached to say they 'need' it), I will simply walk away from the cash register.
I provide myself with precisely the functionality I require, which is plenty good for me.
I can go without checking my email while I'm shopping. In fact, I've been known to go an entire day without using the interwebs -- because I understand that it's just a tool, and not actually vital every moment of the day.
And, from what I can tell, mobile internet on a phone is more than I'm willing to spend, and is mostly just a way to see even more ads and crap like that. Or, apparently provide tracking information to retailers.
Privacy extensions like Ghostery and NoScript are your friend.
I've got Google and Facebook blocked wherever I can. I'm not here to provide them with information about what I do on the internet. Some things are blocked at the firewall, and simply can't be resolved in my house.
It's things like this why the wifi on my phone is disabled when I'm not using it, and why I don't have a data plan.
Measure that bitches. Because I'm sure as hell not providing you with the information.
Why do states wish to entrench a specific business model or exclude someone from it? What does it have to do with them?
What next, banning all forms of on-line shopping to prop up the brick and mortar stores?
This just sounds like more irrational pandering to protect existing business interests -- which isn't really what legislatures should be doing (but do anyway).
Yeah, but these are Hipster Companies, where the design aesthetic of the network trays is far more important.
I'm betting there's an awful lot of pretentious sense of how awesome they are, equipped with turtle-necks and the ability to win buzzword bingo by 9am every day.
This makes me think of those Herman Miller chairs, which became the symbol of the .com era -- if your company had them, it was likely going out of business soon. :-P
Me, I'm looking at a request for beautiful networking trays to be indicative of a company more focused on style than function.
And, in my experience, most companies are only worried about making a good enough product that meets the deadlines, and only somewhat worried about happy customers as long as it isn't below a certain threshold.
And you can bet that Oracle has lawyers ensuring they never actually meet the legal definition of fraud, and that the contracts have enough wiggle room to cover their asses.
But, I can also tell you that it's entirely common for companies contracting for this kind of thing to start off with the full knowledge that they've not asked for enough money to cover everything and get you a working system -- instead they rely on having to do changes and enhancements on a time and materials basis. And then they make a small fortune in quibbling over every little change.
I've seen several of these kinds of things where the contractors essentially knew there was no way to deliver the system on-time and on-budget. They just seem to build in the fact that once the client realizes it, the sunk cost is high enough they get to have a gravy train for some time to come.
It's not fraud, per se, but it's carefully managing the terms of your engagement with the knowledge the customer will end having to pay more and not really have much of a choice.
Sadly, it almost seems to be standard practice in the industry.
If you'd asked anybody that 25 years ago they'd laugh and say it's impossible. My first thought is it still might be, but the jumps they've made in imaging over the last few decades are staggering. Now you can get as good resolution from ground-based telescopes as the ones in space, because the image processing has gotten so much better.
It would be quite a feat to directly image life on a planet over vast distances and through atmospheres, so my complete and total guess is unless they've got something really large and obvious like city lights, we probably can't.
I can't speculate how, but I'm not an astro-physicist (or a physicists for that matter) ... for all I know some of the boffins are trying to figure out how they'd go about this. It certainly would be one hell of a feat.
When I was in university and hung out with astrophysicists, the notion of detecting an exoplanet was still a bit of a stretch. Since then, we've inferred or directly observed so many it's astounding.
No matter what you do, you will find yourself in this same position with Oracle.
I've had the misfortune of using their collaboration platform, which despite their claims to the contrary, was essentially a beta product that even they didn't know how to set up and configure.
My experience with Oracle is they consistently over-promise, under-deliver, and over-charge.
I think the threshold for 'strong' evidence will be in doubt for some time.
Yes, if we see a lot of oxygen we might conclude it's possibly/probably life.
But, the universe conspires to show us new and exotic things we can't quite figure out all the time -- if there's vast clouds of alcohol floating about in space, I think until we're actually directly looking at/talking with something, we'll only ever suspect there could be life.
If they're unconcerned with spying on citizens of other countries on this planet, they're definitely not going to give a damn about those on other planets.
I'll be in my bunk. ;-)
Well, Clarkson et al may be buffoons (and fully aware of it).
But they have driven a tremendous amount of cars under many different circumstances. Usually when they're saying "this is available with even more horses, but we have no idea of why you would" I take that to mean "holy crap is this thing ridiculous".
At a certain point, the 'big penis' cars become something which pretty much require 100% driver attention and focus 100% of the time. And, many of us look at such cars and think to ourselves "even if I had the money, I am nowhere near qualified to operate that thing". I suspect that car would scare the bejeezus out of me in first gear, and if it scared Clarkson, I know damned well I have no business trying it.
I've always found when giving this advice to non-technical folks it was better to focus on what they needed, and leave my politics the hell out of it.
My mother in law expressed interest in a tablet over the last year. So, I did a little digging and decided on the Nexus 7 for her -- after I bought one for myself.
Mine, I went through, disabled or uninstalled stuff, locked down what I could, added ad blockers, and generally tuned it for my needs. For her, because she doesn't want to fiddle with these things -- I set her up in the Google landscape and left her with a tablet which worked and which she won't have to really worry about wrestling with or having to know what works and what doesn't (or what magic is involved in making it work).
She's happy with hers, and I'm happy with mine. But the last thing I wanted to do was start telling her about privacy and internet tracking and the like -- because it's a waste of time, and she doesn't really care. She's far more interested in something which just works than the politics behind it (which would only make the experience with the technology even worse for her).
I've just learned to bite my tongue about all of the scary geeky things that some people really would rather not deal with. Because my web browsers on my PCs are so locked down some sites don't really work, because I've blocked so many things and don't care to find out what to unblock to make it work. The last thing I need is the mother in law bitching about stuff like that to me.
Not at this level of sensitivity.
It's like land speed records -- sure, cars have been going 'fast' for a long time too, but not as fast as the last guy to set the record.
And, in case you've not read TFA ...
So, from a medical perspective we can do some stuff which would be otherwise damaged. From a military perspective instead of a big honking light to let people know you're there, you can do it more covertly. I suspect it would also be useful in a lot of other places -- inside mines for example, or search and rescue type stuff in buildings.
What have you done this week besides bitching on Slashdot? If it isn't scientific progress, get over your bad-assed self and stop treating it all like it's been done before.
Except, it says it right there in the summary:
In other words, while the subject matter is somewhat silly from a real-world perspective, modelling the epidemiology and the like is still sound.
All you really need to be doing is modelling something based on definable parameters (which become the variables you tweak to see how badly it hits everyone).
Short of making up a notional disease, assigning characteristics to it, and going from there -- it seems like picking one that most people can understand but which still gives you valid modelling would be an entirely reasonable approach.
And, really, there's probably more interest in their work now than if it had been on something else. In which case, more people will read it, comment on it, and then refine it. And that, oddly enough, is how we do science for the most part.
And this 'current zombie obsession' has more or less been happening in film since at least the 40's.
And as to why this would be more loathsome and tiresome than superhero movies, car chase movies, Disney movies or any other genre of film -- I have no idea.
It's a form of entertainment, some people like it, some people won't. The rest is mostly irrelevant.
You mean a computer? A server farm? A beowulf cluster?
To me, 'personal cloud' is a totally meaningless term and doesn't correspond to what the cloud is. If it's a couple of servers you own and control, to me that doesn't sound like 'cloud computing' -- it sounds like a marketing term.
Well, if rats are unsuitable test subjects, might I suggest lawyers, politicians, telemarketers and door-to-door sales people?
Cram a couple of pounds of GMO crap down their gullet every day and see what happens. And, Fox could syndicate it and make a fortune. Think of the boost to the economy.
Funny how Monsanto isn't required to definitively prove their crap is safe, but everyone else is required to definitely prove that it isn't.
So basically we've got an evidentiary double-standard where Monsanto et al get to say "perfectly safe until proven otherwise", and we don't get to say "prove it". And then we all get to be the test subjects in the long-term studies.
And, more importantly, having worked at Monsanto should automatically exclude you from being considered from holding an editorial position like this. You mostly have to assume these guys are going to be paid shills who have already made up their mind that it's safe, and he's basically just demonstrated that Food and Chemical Toxicology isn't interested in objective science.
You draw your conclusions, I'll draw mine.
In general, I've come to the conclusion the louder someone screeches about the morality of other people, the higher the likelihood they'll get caught in a scandal.
Which has more or less confirmed for me that people are lying douchebags, who mostly want to point the finger at everyone else.
The more rigid and extreme the position, the more they're full of shit.
Rule #34 is alive and well, I see.