You've lost focus already before you started. Project management is not about reading books, using uml or not or whatever. Project management is about knowing what needs to be done and ensuring it gets done in time. So, instead of reading a book, what you should do is:
1. Ensure you know what needs to be done (this involves things like requirements, customers, deadlines, versions, quality assurance etc.) 2. Make a plan on how to get that done (this involves things like requirements engineers, software engineers, designs, infrastructure, issues trackers, milestone releases etc.) 3. Identify risks and adjust the plan so that you have time to handle those risks (things like 3rd party bugs, engineers dying, hardware failures, requirements changing, performance failing, forgetting what needs to be done, the project team being incompetent etc.)
Repeat this until the project is finished. It's that simple. And that hard at the same time. Your job as a project manager is to continuously evaluate the state of the project and working towards a state in which you feel confident about the road ahead. If you do that properly, there's a small change your project will be a success. But to ensure success, you have to plan for utter failure.
Alcoholic beverages are a CO2-storage. All the beer that's stored somewhere in pubs or your fridge or basement contains CO2, which, therefore, is temporarily out of the atmospheric CO2-cycle. It sort of takes the place of that other CO2-storage, which we're slowly emptying, namely oilfields and the likes. The more alcohol we drink, the more has to be in storage, the more CO2 is temporarily out of the loop. Just like with wooden houses, carbon bikeframes and the likes.
And, even better, since CO2 is used to pressurize taps for alcohol beverages, even more CO2 is out of the loop. The latter is even actually taken directly from the atmosphere!
Also, alcohol consumption lowers the average lifespan of humans, thereby making the problem - humanity - smaller;-)
But that's theory. Reality is a bit more painful; the amount of CO2 in alcohol is miniscule compared to the amount of CO2 that comes into the biosphere through the use of pesticides and fertilizer, which are mostly produced from natural gas. What you should understand, is that for everything you eat and drink, about TEN TIMES AS MUCH energy is needed to produce it than is contained within the food. Therefore, some people say, "we actually eat fossil fuels".
So the bottomline is: yes, alcoholic is killing our planet. But that's not due to the fermentation process, which does not bring NEW carbon into the cycle. Instead, it is due to the energy that's added when growing and transporting it, which basically comes from fossil fuels. The same goes for most other foods and drinks; for each calory you eat, ten calories of fossil fuel were used to produce it.
Possibly more interesting is that the fact that you ask this question shows your lack of understanding of the amount of CO2 that a simple car produces. There's about 50-60 gram of CO2 in a liter of beer. Using a liter of fuel in your car produces about 2500 grams of CO2. That's about 50 times as much. So, if you want to compensate for your beer consumption, just try to use 1 tank of fuel less a year; that'll give you enough CO2-credits to drink well over 20 beers each day, which should be more than enough:-)
Isn't it ironic that the parts of the ISS that are meant to absorb as much sunlight as they can, actually reflect enough of it to make the ISS the seconds brightest object in the sky:P
The grainyness doesn't translate directly into the universe being a hologram; it's the other way around. The hologram principle predicts a certain grain-size (bigger grains than predicted by other theories) and that seems to correspond quite nicely to the noise detected by the GEO600.
You might be right, but your explanation is not what I understood from the article (but translating dense physics-speak isn't my forte either;-)). What I understood from it is that they've still not been able to measure gravity waves, so we still don't know if gravity behaves like a particle or not. What they're saying, is that space and time might be grainy, and even more grainy than was previously thought and possibly even so grainy that it renders our current attempt of measuring gravity waves futile.
So it's not about gravity being discrete, it's about space and time being discrete, which shows up as a jitter-like noise in the gravity-wave measuring experiment.
We're not a single step closer to creating life. Self-replicating RNA was already created in the lab somewhere in 2001 or possibly even earlier than that:
The only new thing about this research, is that they've proven that self-replicating RNA actually evolves, which is a major step as well, but it doesn't bring us any closer to creating life. Also note that the biggest question of all, is how those RNA molecules would be formed from the primordial soup; so far we've only been able to manufacture them in the lab.
Nuclear power is, believe it or not, the cleanest technology we have available
That's true (if you consider the carbon footprint of nuclear energy to be a measurement of cleanless, which seems fair to me). But it won't be forever; as the richest uranium ores have already been mined, we probably will steadily approach the level where the carbon footprint of nuclear energy is comparable to that of other clean energy sources like wind and solar.
Also, in theory it is possible to produce solar panels with near zero environmental impact, as long as the energy required to produce them is produced by solar panels;-) The same is true for uranium mining, though.
Um. How would you clean up a layer of ash 20 centimeters thick that spans half a country?! That's enough debris to create about 30 new Mount Everests... Well that's if it were compacted; in its dusty form it's probably more like half a meter thick. Since it tends to collect in lower areas, expect up to a meter of very fine (like quicksand) ash in the streets. This will not be cleaned up; mother nature will add add a bit of water and half the country will effectively become a massive mudslide or it will be covered under a big fat slab of concrete heavy enough to make just about any house collapse. Well, not just about any house, only the houses that are still standing after the massive mudflows...
This ash is not just normal ash either, it is like tiny splinters of glass that form a layer of concrete when water is added. Lungs are very wet places as fat as this ash is concerned...
Also, your comparison with Mount St. Helens makes no sense; if Yellowstone were to blow, it would produce 300-1000 times as much debris as Mount St. Helens did in 1980. Volcanos like Yellowstone probably produce enough debris to not only trigger an ice age, but the dust they leave in the atmosphere might very well be enough not to have any agricultural production for years. So Yellowstone might not just be big enough to wipe out half the United States, it might be big enough to wipe out most of humanity. The summary is not "a bit alarmist", it is very conservative.
Another nice mechanical way to store energy is to pump pressurized air into underground salt domes as is already being done for about 25 years in Germany:
the majority of cops don't have the skills to forensically analyse a computer
The majority of cops doesn't even have the skills to find my computer halfway up the old chimney;P However, I'm looking forward to the day they have to work their way through my massive computer-cemetery;->
Ah ok! I couldn't find an image with a resolution high enough to see that. Thanks for the clarification; that changes my opinion from "i can understand that if i try really hard" to "omfg you morons!".
Well I used the word "sex" for the sake of the bad joke, but what it actually comes down to, is the difference between nude material and erotic material. The Scorpions album cover is obviously erotic material; the posture of the girl combined with the rays of light that appear to be coming from the girls' clitoris combined with the title of the album is pretty obviously meant to be erotic. Had they left out the rays of light, they'd probably have been fine.
I also think that it is slightly more absurd to say that simple child nudity should be illegal (it is definately not child pr0n since it is not pr0n, that's for sure) than cartoons being illegal. Both are completely absurd, but since the first one makes just about any parent a criminal while the second one only makes people that draw erotic images of children criminals, the former is more abject then the latter. The latter has only recently been made illegal in the Netherlands, so I remember a bit about the discussion; one of the most difficult problems is that it keeps getting more difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is not, which would make drawing a line between reality and fiction progressively more difficult. I'm not sure, but I believe it does not really matter how real a drawing is in my country. Stupid lawmakers.
Where I live (the Netherlands) the law definately makes that difference. And the cartoon that this article is about is definately considerd childpr0n. So I suppose where you live, just about any parent should be arrested for producing childpr0n? That's even sicker than this cartoon being illegal, man.
There's nothing to discuss. Drug prohibition has nothing to do with the dangers of the prohibited drugs as classified by experts. If it had something to do with that, either tobacco and alcohol would have to be prohibited or XTC, LSD, marijuana and a lot of other drugs that cause less harm than tobacco and alcohol, would have to be legalised.
Drug prohibition is not based on any rational argument, so there's nothing to discuss. Drug prohibition laws as they are now are based on superstition, religion, arrogance, hate, misplaced autority, stupidity and a lot of money. In short: FUD. Good luck trying to discuss about that.
TCP does two things at the cost of some overhead: it ensures packets arrive in order and it ensures they arrive. While doing that, it also has to ensure that in the case of network congestion, packets are resent within reasonable time while being fair and allowing each TCP connection an equal share of the speed and bandwidth. The problems TCP solves are at the root of the success of bittorent; bittorrent is extremely good at spreading traffic in such a way that links that have those problems are avoided. It can do this since the order in which the packets arrive does not matter and in fact it does not matter whether they arrive from a certain host at all; it can simply request a lost packet from another host minutes or hours later. In the case of TCP/IP there is no provision to handle such a case; it keeps trying to get the packets at their destination in the right order as quickly as possible.
So none of the problems that TCP solves affect bittorrent and all the overhead that TCP causes, however small, serves no purpose in this case. Instead of many small TCP ACKs, resends, negotiation, and what else TCP does, bittorrent will do just fine with one status update every now and then, which it can conveniently combine with the packets that are sent the other way anyway. Therefore, IMHO, using UDP for bittorrent is fine; it will help spread bittorrent traffic even better over the fastest links while using less bytes of network traffic and it might even end up making it easier on the Internet since now bittorrent traffic no longer has to fight with other TCP connections for a fair share of the bandwidth; it can be tuned to get just a little bit less.
Of course they can fuck it up completely and fill the poor pipes of the Internet with loads of packets that never arrive, but they don't have to; it is not inherent to this solution and therefore such rumours should be classified as... FUD.
Disclaimer: I did not RTFA and now practically nothing about TCP/IP:-)
Another way to say it: the amount of energy required to produce 6L of water is about equal to half a liter of diesel. Burning half a liter of diesel would produce about 7L of water.
This device is even more ridiculous than propelling a sailing ship with a fan powered by a windmill...
Slashdot Mirror
You should try staring at the sky for 30 minutes with your mouth closed - you need pitbull-jaws to achieve such a feat:-)
This is the main reason many adults don't read books for fun anymore, even when they were totally addicted before having to read book for grades...
I'd pay to have it blocked so I can get back to watching TV like normal people do:P
You've lost focus already before you started. Project management is not about reading books, using uml or not or whatever. Project management is about knowing what needs to be done and ensuring it gets done in time. So, instead of reading a book, what you should do is:
1. Ensure you know what needs to be done (this involves things like requirements, customers, deadlines, versions, quality assurance etc.)
2. Make a plan on how to get that done (this involves things like requirements engineers, software engineers, designs, infrastructure, issues trackers, milestone releases etc.)
3. Identify risks and adjust the plan so that you have time to handle those risks (things like 3rd party bugs, engineers dying, hardware failures, requirements changing, performance failing, forgetting what needs to be done, the project team being incompetent etc.)
Repeat this until the project is finished. It's that simple. And that hard at the same time. Your job as a project manager is to continuously evaluate the state of the project and working towards a state in which you feel confident about the road ahead. If you do that properly, there's a small change your project will be a success. But to ensure success, you have to plan for utter failure.
Alcoholic beverages are a CO2-storage. All the beer that's stored somewhere in pubs or your fridge or basement contains CO2, which, therefore, is temporarily out of the atmospheric CO2-cycle. It sort of takes the place of that other CO2-storage, which we're slowly emptying, namely oilfields and the likes. The more alcohol we drink, the more has to be in storage, the more CO2 is temporarily out of the loop. Just like with wooden houses, carbon bikeframes and the likes.
And, even better, since CO2 is used to pressurize taps for alcohol beverages, even more CO2 is out of the loop. The latter is even actually taken directly from the atmosphere!
Also, alcohol consumption lowers the average lifespan of humans, thereby making the problem - humanity - smaller;-)
But that's theory. Reality is a bit more painful; the amount of CO2 in alcohol is miniscule compared to the amount of CO2 that comes into the biosphere through the use of pesticides and fertilizer, which are mostly produced from natural gas. What you should understand, is that for everything you eat and drink, about TEN TIMES AS MUCH energy is needed to produce it than is contained within the food. Therefore, some people say, "we actually eat fossil fuels".
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html
So the bottomline is: yes, alcoholic is killing our planet. But that's not due to the fermentation process, which does not bring NEW carbon into the cycle. Instead, it is due to the energy that's added when growing and transporting it, which basically comes from fossil fuels. The same goes for most other foods and drinks; for each calory you eat, ten calories of fossil fuel were used to produce it.
Possibly more interesting is that the fact that you ask this question shows your lack of understanding of the amount of CO2 that a simple car produces. There's about 50-60 gram of CO2 in a liter of beer. Using a liter of fuel in your car produces about 2500 grams of CO2. That's about 50 times as much. So, if you want to compensate for your beer consumption, just try to use 1 tank of fuel less a year; that'll give you enough CO2-credits to drink well over 20 beers each day, which should be more than enough:-)
Isn't it ironic that the parts of the ISS that are meant to absorb as much sunlight as they can, actually reflect enough of it to make the ISS the seconds brightest object in the sky:P
These guys make great cheap helmet cams.
http://www2.oregonscientific.com/
How to encourage workers has not been a secret since 1968, when Frederick Herzberg published a brilliant book on his research on motivating engineers.
http://www.amazon.com/Motivation-Work-Frederick-Herzberg/dp/156000634X
The grainyness doesn't translate directly into the universe being a hologram; it's the other way around. The hologram principle predicts a certain grain-size (bigger grains than predicted by other theories) and that seems to correspond quite nicely to the noise detected by the GEO600.
More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
You might be right, but your explanation is not what I understood from the article (but translating dense physics-speak isn't my forte either;-)). What I understood from it is that they've still not been able to measure gravity waves, so we still don't know if gravity behaves like a particle or not. What they're saying, is that space and time might be grainy, and even more grainy than was previously thought and possibly even so grainy that it renders our current attempt of measuring gravity waves futile.
So it's not about gravity being discrete, it's about space and time being discrete, which shows up as a jitter-like noise in the gravity-wave measuring experiment.
We're not a single step closer to creating life. Self-replicating RNA was already created in the lab somewhere in 2001 or possibly even earlier than that:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/292/5520/1319
The only new thing about this research, is that they've proven that self-replicating RNA actually evolves, which is a major step as well, but it doesn't bring us any closer to creating life. Also note that the biggest question of all, is how those RNA molecules would be formed from the primordial soup; so far we've only been able to manufacture them in the lab.
Nuclear power is, believe it or not, the cleanest technology we have available
That's true (if you consider the carbon footprint of nuclear energy to be a measurement of cleanless, which seems fair to me). But it won't be forever; as the richest uranium ores have already been mined, we probably will steadily approach the level where the carbon footprint of nuclear energy is comparable to that of other clean energy sources like wind and solar.
At least, that's what the UK government sort of says: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/postpn268.pdf
Also, in theory it is possible to produce solar panels with near zero environmental impact, as long as the energy required to produce them is produced by solar panels;-) The same is true for uranium mining, though.
once the ash is cleaned up
Um. How would you clean up a layer of ash 20 centimeters thick that spans half a country?! That's enough debris to create about 30 new Mount Everests... Well that's if it were compacted; in its dusty form it's probably more like half a meter thick. Since it tends to collect in lower areas, expect up to a meter of very fine (like quicksand) ash in the streets. This will not be cleaned up; mother nature will add add a bit of water and half the country will effectively become a massive mudslide or it will be covered under a big fat slab of concrete heavy enough to make just about any house collapse. Well, not just about any house, only the houses that are still standing after the massive mudflows...
This ash is not just normal ash either, it is like tiny splinters of glass that form a layer of concrete when water is added. Lungs are very wet places as fat as this ash is concerned...
Also, your comparison with Mount St. Helens makes no sense; if Yellowstone were to blow, it would produce 300-1000 times as much debris as Mount St. Helens did in 1980. Volcanos like Yellowstone probably produce enough debris to not only trigger an ice age, but the dust they leave in the atmosphere might very well be enough not to have any agricultural production for years. So Yellowstone might not just be big enough to wipe out half the United States, it might be big enough to wipe out most of humanity. The summary is not "a bit alarmist", it is very conservative.
An increasingly more common mechanical solution to this problem is to use flywheels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9968539-54.html
Another nice mechanical way to store energy is to pump pressurized air into underground salt domes as is already being done for about 25 years in Germany:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/01/compressed_air_2.php
But your solution of lifting heavy stuff is in use as well in the form of pumping water back into storage lakes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wivenhoe_Power_Station,_Queensland
http://www.usbr.gov/power/data/sites/mtelbert/mtelbert.html
I think the average slashdotter actually gets more work done when the PC is off:P
the majority of cops don't have the skills to forensically analyse a computer
The majority of cops doesn't even have the skills to find my computer halfway up the old chimney;P However, I'm looking forward to the day they have to work their way through my massive computer-cemetery;->
Ah ok! I couldn't find an image with a resolution high enough to see that. Thanks for the clarification; that changes my opinion from "i can understand that if i try really hard" to "omfg you morons!".
Well I used the word "sex" for the sake of the bad joke, but what it actually comes down to, is the difference between nude material and erotic material. The Scorpions album cover is obviously erotic material; the posture of the girl combined with the rays of light that appear to be coming from the girls' clitoris combined with the title of the album is pretty obviously meant to be erotic. Had they left out the rays of light, they'd probably have been fine.
I also think that it is slightly more absurd to say that simple child nudity should be illegal (it is definately not child pr0n since it is not pr0n, that's for sure) than cartoons being illegal. Both are completely absurd, but since the first one makes just about any parent a criminal while the second one only makes people that draw erotic images of children criminals, the former is more abject then the latter. The latter has only recently been made illegal in the Netherlands, so I remember a bit about the discussion; one of the most difficult problems is that it keeps getting more difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is not, which would make drawing a line between reality and fiction progressively more difficult. I'm not sure, but I believe it does not really matter how real a drawing is in my country. Stupid lawmakers.
Where I live (the Netherlands) the law definately makes that difference. And the cartoon that this article is about is definately considerd childpr0n. So I suppose where you live, just about any parent should be arrested for producing childpr0n? That's even sicker than this cartoon being illegal, man.
You've definately come to the right place here at slashdot, given that you do not seem to understand the difference between nudity and sex;-)
There's nothing to discuss. Drug prohibition has nothing to do with the dangers of the prohibited drugs as classified by experts. If it had something to do with that, either tobacco and alcohol would have to be prohibited or XTC, LSD, marijuana and a lot of other drugs that cause less harm than tobacco and alcohol, would have to be legalised.
Drug prohibition is not based on any rational argument, so there's nothing to discuss. Drug prohibition laws as they are now are based on superstition, religion, arrogance, hate, misplaced autority, stupidity and a lot of money. In short: FUD. Good luck trying to discuss about that.
TCP does two things at the cost of some overhead: it ensures packets arrive in order and it ensures they arrive. While doing that, it also has to ensure that in the case of network congestion, packets are resent within reasonable time while being fair and allowing each TCP connection an equal share of the speed and bandwidth. The problems TCP solves are at the root of the success of bittorent; bittorrent is extremely good at spreading traffic in such a way that links that have those problems are avoided. It can do this since the order in which the packets arrive does not matter and in fact it does not matter whether they arrive from a certain host at all; it can simply request a lost packet from another host minutes or hours later. In the case of TCP/IP there is no provision to handle such a case; it keeps trying to get the packets at their destination in the right order as quickly as possible.
So none of the problems that TCP solves affect bittorrent and all the overhead that TCP causes, however small, serves no purpose in this case. Instead of many small TCP ACKs, resends, negotiation, and what else TCP does, bittorrent will do just fine with one status update every now and then, which it can conveniently combine with the packets that are sent the other way anyway. Therefore, IMHO, using UDP for bittorrent is fine; it will help spread bittorrent traffic even better over the fastest links while using less bytes of network traffic and it might even end up making it easier on the Internet since now bittorrent traffic no longer has to fight with other TCP connections for a fair share of the bandwidth; it can be tuned to get just a little bit less.
Of course they can fuck it up completely and fill the poor pipes of the Internet with loads of packets that never arrive, but they don't have to; it is not inherent to this solution and therefore such rumours should be classified as... FUD.
Disclaimer: I did not RTFA and now practically nothing about TCP/IP :-)
I suppose you mean Revelation, the Doom Metal band from Maryland? It does not sound like that at all to me, frankly.
Another way to say it: the amount of energy required to produce 6L of water is about equal to half a liter of diesel. Burning half a liter of diesel would produce about 7L of water.
This device is even more ridiculous than propelling a sailing ship with a fan powered by a windmill...
I must have misspelled IANFO...
I are not a flying ostrich. I are baboon!