If you stick with unencumbered stuff, you'll eventually run out of technology. Let's face it, people invent stuff and want to be compensated. Some of the stuff is pretty neat. It wasn't so long ago that the consensus was that you couldn't compress audio...so much for that idea (does anyone remember those days?).
Instead, why doesn't the FSF (or some other organization lobbying for open-ness) just license the patents and release their own player/library/whatever?
It sounds like what gets people's goat is that it's not free, not that it's not open.
"Our DNA is basically a blue print of who we are. Our limitations, strengths, etc..."
Don't think of DNA as a blueprint. Think of it more as a book of recipes. Various dishes can be cooked at any given time, and there are (or can be) multiple variations of each recipe depending on a host of different factors, some of which are environmental.
There's a question whether numbers and counting are inherent in language or not. The consensus before now was that everyone can do "one" and "two", but after that the quantity gets sort of vague. There are various other quantitiy equivalents (like "some" and "a bunch") which stand for more than two, and they tend to be mostly consistent ("some" "a bunch", but the number of items in "some" and "a bunch" can vary).
These guys don't even bother with "one" or "two."
What does that really mean?
Well, that means that numbers (and counting) are really a construct, and not inherent in the structure of the brain. That's actually a pretty interesting thing to know.
It's strange, though - how do they answer the question "how many eyes do you have?"
* You can ignore the "not useful in their culture" crack because that isn't data, that's an opinion by the researcher.
It doesn't really work. Folders = mail you don't have to see until you want/need to.
Maybe it's just a functionality problem. Can you auto-label incoming email? Can you filter your inbox depending on the label? As far as I can tell, you can't. The only thing you can do that's different than folders is have an email that has more than one label.
Big deal.
They take the 10% case and remove the 90% case. That to me sounds like engineering gone bad. But what do I know, I'm a user.
It is a fucking nightmare - for users. Everything google does (except advertising and search-related stuff) is half-baked.
Google checkout? I'd like to use it instead of Paypal, but you can't even download a useful report of your orders. WTF is with that?
Gmail: no folders? WTF is with that? Labels are not like folders, and they're not better.
Grand Central: whoa, what happened? Looks like the trains have stopped.
Google seems to be a great place to whack off as a developer, but when it comes to making stuff that people want, it seems less than successful (except for search & ads).
"To complete our work, we investigated a nonrepresentative selection of four Web sites selling nutrigenetic tests.
What's amusing is that they only had two DNA samples, from a 9-month old girl and a 48-year old man...but they submitted them 16 times to four separate sites with different profile information.
The short of it is: the four sites in question seem to base their results off of your profile questions, not your DNA. In addition, they attempt to cross-sell supplements to you.
I wish they had done more than 4 sites, but maybe that's all they could find back in 2006.
"A lot of commercial genetic testing is scientifically worthless, even harmful if they give you bad information about what your genetics actually means for you or your children"
This is a useless statement. There is no expectation that what people tell you is anywhere close to how they voted. It's a secret ballot for a reason.
Given that, there actually is no way to tell if a vote was recorded correctly unless you can map a vote to an individual on a 1-to-1 basis, which mostly obviates the secret ballot concept.
Having just experienced a STREAMS/CDC nightmare, I'd suggest using some other mechanism for synchronizing your databases. STREAMS issues almost took down a production database...and none of the issues were seen in the test system, which was pretty much identical to the production system.
There are large numbers of patches required (10.2), and there's a large amount of training your DBAs will need to be able to babysit STREAMS replication.
Just do an exp/imp every day. Realtime isn't worth that much aggravation.
Note, though, that ignoring the hardware cost of a Windows box only is valid until the next hardware upgrade cycle.
I think IBM's hardware replacement cycle is 3 years (leases), so if the timing is right there may not be that much extra expense. They'll have to upgrade the hardware to run Vista anyway, and the extra hardware cost of a Mac would be marginal at the scale that IBM is talking about. In fact, since it's all eaten by IBM finance the actual cost really doesn't matter that much (blue dollars).
The question is if they got a productivity boost. It's unbelievably difficult to get those, so if they can show that they got a 4% or 6% boost in productivity by switching, that's more than worth the cost of the hardware/software. Scale that across IGS, and suddenly you've changed how well your whole company works.
"had discussed in past management meetings that when the production system goes down, immediate verbal communication between engineers was acceptable to expedite the issue -- as long as the managers were notified."
If a system dies over the weekend and it's a production system, you get the guys who know on the phone immediately. Basic troubleshooting steps in this case are problematic for two reasons: (1) in general, you want to get the system up as fast as possible, and (2) if the problem was easy to fix, it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
The problem really isn't that Dirk is a prick. The problem is Dirk doesn't care about his customers. Why can I say that? Because he's droping crap into a production environment and doesn't care that it doesn't work. The second problem is that the overboss feels the same way.
When this stuff happens to you, drag the customer (or the customer advocates) into the picture. You can bring this point of view all the way to the CEO if you want to. Nobody gets fired for arguing on the customer's behalf, unless the organization it a complete scam from top to bottom. If it is, then you either quit (because why would you want to work there if you actually care about what you do) or be a prick to everyone else in return (which is what most people do, I think).
It's funny - usually the attack mentality gets shot down pretty quickly in the US. There was a thread a few years ago about using your IDS to go after people attacking your server...the consensus was it was a Bad Idea. It's pretty much illegal to do in the US anyway, but it also seen as bad karma.
OTOH, there's no technical reason not use snort + script kiddie tools to automatically detect intruders and try to whack them. You can identify botnet members pretty easily from the pattern of accesses (the probes tend to come in waves, as various parts of the swarm poke your boxes).
The US could just hide in that swarm of accesses, poking servers and doing slow scans to figure out what's where. It's pretty easy these days to do signature profiling on systems, and to just stash this info in a database somewhere. Update each entry every few weeks, and be able to update ranges on demand.
The only really hard part is getting your own botnet up and running. The US Government could, theoretically, tap into the search engines to do this for them, which would be pretty amusing. Nobody pays attention to web spiders, and well, if the spider does a slow port scan 'accidentally' who cares?
I remember one of my professors mentioning that he was in the office of the president of some African country assisting them with "determining" the value of various financial (and other) metrics for large, unnamed NGOs like the UN.
For most countries, statistical information is really wishful thinking. If you can't control your borders, tax your citizens effectively, or provide infrastructure, you can't collect accurate statistics. Indeed, even for developed countries statistics may be suspect, especially trade data.
However, as people like to say, even bad data is better than no data.
During the Gaius Baltar election period there was an attempt to manipulate the election results. As viewers know, Baltar was inaugurated, and things went south pretty quickly.
An interesting debate question is: was honoring the election results really the right thing to do? Would everyone have been better off if Roslin was reelected, even though it would have been due to vote fraud?
Slashdot Mirror
Video quality is good compared to CIF. Compared to iChat, skype video is really bad.
If you stick with unencumbered stuff, you'll eventually run out of technology. Let's face it, people invent stuff and want to be compensated. Some of the stuff is pretty neat. It wasn't so long ago that the consensus was that you couldn't compress audio...so much for that idea (does anyone remember those days?).
Instead, why doesn't the FSF (or some other organization lobbying for open-ness) just license the patents and release their own player/library/whatever?
It sounds like what gets people's goat is that it's not free, not that it's not open.
"Our DNA is basically a blue print of who we are. Our limitations, strengths, etc..."
Don't think of DNA as a blueprint. Think of it more as a book of recipes. Various dishes can be cooked at any given time, and there are (or can be) multiple variations of each recipe depending on a host of different factors, some of which are environmental.
The programmers of California have created the greatest payroll application of all time. You can only raise salaries, not lower them. Ingenious!
You're missing the point of the article.
There's a question whether numbers and counting are inherent in language or not. The consensus before now was that everyone can do "one" and "two", but after that the quantity gets sort of vague. There are various other quantitiy equivalents (like "some" and "a bunch") which stand for more than two, and they tend to be mostly consistent ("some" "a bunch", but the number of items in "some" and "a bunch" can vary).
These guys don't even bother with "one" or "two."
What does that really mean?
Well, that means that numbers (and counting) are really a construct, and not inherent in the structure of the brain. That's actually a pretty interesting thing to know.
It's strange, though - how do they answer the question "how many eyes do you have?"
* You can ignore the "not useful in their culture" crack because that isn't data, that's an opinion by the researcher.
1. cheap, reliable electricity generation
2. cheap, reliable air conditioning
Those two things alone would make an unbelievable difference in the lives of pretty much everyone in the Third World.
Clean micro-power would obivate the need for (1) expensive to own/operate gas/diesel generators and (2) large infrastructure investments.
Cheap, reliable air conditioning would benefit both industry (food storage and transportation) and normal life (things really are nicer in AC).
These two would change life radically in the third world...for the better.
Yeah try this:
Insert 25,000 emails
label them
view your inbox
It doesn't really work. Folders = mail you don't have to see until you want/need to.
Maybe it's just a functionality problem. Can you auto-label incoming email? Can you filter your inbox depending on the label? As far as I can tell, you can't. The only thing you can do that's different than folders is have an email that has more than one label.
Big deal.
They take the 10% case and remove the 90% case. That to me sounds like engineering gone bad. But what do I know, I'm a user.
It is a fucking nightmare - for users. Everything google does (except advertising and search-related stuff) is half-baked.
Google checkout? I'd like to use it instead of Paypal, but you can't even download a useful report of your orders. WTF is with that?
Gmail: no folders? WTF is with that? Labels are not like folders, and they're not better.
Grand Central: whoa, what happened? Looks like the trains have stopped.
Google seems to be a great place to whack off as a developer, but when it comes to making stuff that people want, it seems less than successful (except for search & ads).
Interesting study!
"To complete our work, we investigated a nonrepresentative selection of four Web sites selling nutrigenetic tests.
What's amusing is that they only had two DNA samples, from a 9-month old girl and a 48-year old man...but they submitted them 16 times to four separate sites with different profile information.
The short of it is: the four sites in question seem to base their results off of your profile questions, not your DNA. In addition, they attempt to cross-sell supplements to you.
I wish they had done more than 4 sites, but maybe that's all they could find back in 2006.
"A lot of commercial genetic testing is scientifically worthless, even harmful if they give you bad information about what your genetics actually means for you or your children"
Do you have any actual data that backs this up?
If you noticed, the 2600 web site was not shut down. And, of course, it did fall under the criminal definition.
Whether you agree with that definition is another thing. And as a citizen of the US, you can work (perhaps futilly) to get the law changed.
The government doesn't shut down websites. They can't, legally, unless there's something criminal going on.
This is a useless statement. There is no expectation that what people tell you is anywhere close to how they voted. It's a secret ballot for a reason.
Given that, there actually is no way to tell if a vote was recorded correctly unless you can map a vote to an individual on a 1-to-1 basis, which mostly obviates the secret ballot concept.
Note that paper ballots have the same problem.
Until Apple gets another CDMA carrier,Verizon users will be SOL. Why support another technology when you can do GSM and get most of the world?
Having just experienced a STREAMS/CDC nightmare, I'd suggest using some other mechanism for synchronizing your databases. STREAMS issues almost took down a production database...and none of the issues were seen in the test system, which was pretty much identical to the production system.
There are large numbers of patches required (10.2), and there's a large amount of training your DBAs will need to be able to babysit STREAMS replication.
Just do an exp/imp every day. Realtime isn't worth that much aggravation.
Note: I wasn't the dba, I was a stakeholder. Ugh.
I thought the minimum number of individuals to avoid massive genetic problems was much larger than 2000. Interesting.
Note, though, that ignoring the hardware cost of a Windows box only is valid until the next hardware upgrade cycle.
I think IBM's hardware replacement cycle is 3 years (leases), so if the timing is right there may not be that much extra expense. They'll have to upgrade the hardware to run Vista anyway, and the extra hardware cost of a Mac would be marginal at the scale that IBM is talking about. In fact, since it's all eaten by IBM finance the actual cost really doesn't matter that much (blue dollars).
The question is if they got a productivity boost. It's unbelievably difficult to get those, so if they can show that they got a 4% or 6% boost in productivity by switching, that's more than worth the cost of the hardware/software. Scale that across IGS, and suddenly you've changed how well your whole company works.
"had discussed in past management meetings that when the production system goes down, immediate verbal communication between engineers was acceptable to expedite the issue -- as long as the managers were notified."
If a system dies over the weekend and it's a production system, you get the guys who know on the phone immediately. Basic troubleshooting steps in this case are problematic for two reasons: (1) in general, you want to get the system up as fast as possible, and (2) if the problem was easy to fix, it shouldn't have happened in the first place.
The problem really isn't that Dirk is a prick. The problem is Dirk doesn't care about his customers. Why can I say that? Because he's droping crap into a production environment and doesn't care that it doesn't work. The second problem is that the overboss feels the same way.
When this stuff happens to you, drag the customer (or the customer advocates) into the picture. You can bring this point of view all the way to the CEO if you want to. Nobody gets fired for arguing on the customer's behalf, unless the organization it a complete scam from top to bottom. If it is, then you either quit (because why would you want to work there if you actually care about what you do) or be a prick to everyone else in return (which is what most people do, I think).
It's funny - usually the attack mentality gets shot down pretty quickly in the US. There was a thread a few years ago about using your IDS to go after people attacking your server...the consensus was it was a Bad Idea. It's pretty much illegal to do in the US anyway, but it also seen as bad karma.
OTOH, there's no technical reason not use snort + script kiddie tools to automatically detect intruders and try to whack them. You can identify botnet members pretty easily from the pattern of accesses (the probes tend to come in waves, as various parts of the swarm poke your boxes).
The US could just hide in that swarm of accesses, poking servers and doing slow scans to figure out what's where. It's pretty easy these days to do signature profiling on systems, and to just stash this info in a database somewhere. Update each entry every few weeks, and be able to update ranges on demand.
The only really hard part is getting your own botnet up and running. The US Government could, theoretically, tap into the search engines to do this for them, which would be pretty amusing. Nobody pays attention to web spiders, and well, if the spider does a slow port scan 'accidentally' who cares?
Whoa, that's a change. Before they used straight CPU time. I guess they weren't making enough at that price point.
It's $72/month if you're at 100% cpu all momnth. It's $.10 per cpu hour, which is retardedly cheap, because you only pay for what you use.
I haven't used it because of the lack of a static IP. Now, it's a viable solution for the real world.
I remember one of my professors mentioning that he was in the office of the president of some African country assisting them with "determining" the value of various financial (and other) metrics for large, unnamed NGOs like the UN.
For most countries, statistical information is really wishful thinking. If you can't control your borders, tax your citizens effectively, or provide infrastructure, you can't collect accurate statistics. Indeed, even for developed countries statistics may be suspect, especially trade data.
However, as people like to say, even bad data is better than no data.
During the Gaius Baltar election period there was an attempt to manipulate the election results. As viewers know, Baltar was inaugurated, and things went south pretty quickly.
An interesting debate question is: was honoring the election results really the right thing to do? Would everyone have been better off if Roslin was reelected, even though it would have been due to vote fraud?
Well, you could put it into list view and sort by kind. That moves folders to the top of the list.
Or, you could just start adding random characters to your folder name so they show up at the top of a list.
Or use that dock stacks thing.
Yuk yuk yuk. Your wit is painful to witness.
Yeah, remove Application Enhancer before installing Leopard. That always does the trick.