I have nightmarish pictures popping into my head of a waterfall of ethernet cables spewing from this with user's ports un-numbered with no network diagrams.
I think this scenario is precisely why BOFHs have PFYs.
Since my daughter was around 6, I've routinely made up answers that sound plausible at first but are clearly wrong if anyone over 5 thinks about them for a few seconds. She does the whole "thanks!... um, wait, that's not right!" reaction, and I give her the right answers.
I work in science, so I want her to know science... but I also want her to think critically and know when someone's BS'ing her.:)
If you can find your way to Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii, we have:
- 'Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaii - first planetarium in the world to have full-dome 3D projection. It's a bit of an unusual place as the exhibit space deals both with astronomy and Hawaiian culture (yes, the signage is bilingual.)
- Mauna Kea Observatories and the Ellison Onizuka Center for International Astronomy's visitor station - rent a 4WD and catch a free tour of something extremely large and shiny. Weekends, it's the 10-meter Keck I telescope, tour meets at the visitor station at 1pm; weekdays, Japan's 8-meter Subaru telescope* offers tours; reserve yours on www.subarutelescope.org. After the tour, hang around the visitor station at 9200 feet for stargazing.
- Hawaii Volcanoes National Park - active volcanoes, of course. 28 miles south of Hilo.
- NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory, where they've done the atmospheric CO2 measurements for many years. www.mlo.noaa.gov has info on viisting.
Those are the first few things that come to mind... Hilo also has the base facilities for the CalTech Submillimeter Observatory, Gemini North, UK Infrared Telescope, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, Subaru Telescope, NASA Infra-Red Telescope Facility, Harvard-Smithsonian Submillimeter Array and the UH 2.2-meter telescope, and NOAA's (small) Mokupapapa educational center about the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument; Waimea (north part of the island) has the Keck and Canada-France-Hawaii base facilities. Kona side has the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii (NELHA); I haven't been there.
If you have any marine geeks, we have snorkeling; plant geeks we have rainforests; avian geeks we have hard-to-find endemic native birds... life is like one long natural-sciences field trip here.
If a black rectangular box - even a somewhat shiny one - strikes you as an example of aesthetics, you really need to pause "2001," lock the screen, step away from your Linux box, go up the stairs out of your mom's basement, put on some sunglasses and sunscreen and go spend some time in the big room with the bright lights and the blue ceiling.
Find some people on the street - people whose life does not revolve around Linux systems of their own construction - and ask them whether they think a black box, shiny or not, has any beauty to it, compared to products that they personally own or use.
A business to asking someone to keep quiet in order to have a problem resolved is pretty arrogant.
To honest consumers like you and me and them? Sure. But the article notes that this is more common on older iPods (imagine that - fancy newfangled batteries are more prone to trouble as they get older?) and from a corporate lawyer's viewpoint, having settlements and their terms made public only increases the risk of people running 250V through their years-old iPods in hopes of getting a shiny new one.
The Times has learnt that the company would offer the family a full refund only if they were willing to sign a settlement form. The proposed agreement left them open to legal action if they ever disclosed the terms of the settlement.
I don't see where it says they can't say the iPod exploded.
I do see where it says they can't disclose the terms of the settlement, which is absolutely normal and common as far as settlement language goes.
Was there something newsworthy here that I missed?
There's been buzz this week about the labels having finally persuaded Apple to offer a digitally-distributed "album" including liner notes, videos, ring tones, etc.
So if you're the labels, you create the digital package, let Apple (and presumably others, either right away or down the line) distribute a gazillion copies at no incremental cost to you... and you ship a container-load of CDs to WalMart for people who're still using 25-year-old technology.
Looks like they're just preparing for the shift away from rotating-spindle physical media.:)
When they started trying to be the anti-Google, and be as evil as possible. I still remember the time they sent me alarmingly-worded letters about the need to renew a couple domains with them... shortly after I transferred those domains to another registrar.
I've figured all along I was just one of many who were happy to be rid of them. Today? Doubly so.
I'm glad to see Greenpeace finish griping about Apple's failure to publish the "precautionary principle" (in Greenpeace-approved wording) on its web site, like every good environmental NGO does... and get around to pointing fingers at the real purveyors of plastic junk.:)
So 1 in roughly every 11 million iPods has this sort of problem.
Out of curiosity, are there other products that burst into flames spontaneously at rates lower than 1 in every 11 million? I'm just thinking that if I bought 11 million of anything - including fire extinguishers - I wouldn't be terribly surprised if one went *FOOM!* one day.
It's a bit more complicated than that; I've posted additional details in a reply elsewhere in the thread. Thanks for your thoughtful responses, though.
Wow, someone who actually knows something about the limitations that exist on commercial photography. Thanks.:)
For the others: it's not just "my workplace" that's at ods with Wikipedia. The building where I work sits on state (aka "public") land, in the US. Yes, anyone and their dog can quite easily wander up outside it and take photos for personal use. However, the state - like virtually every state in the US - requires permits for commercial photographers and/or film crews, and liability insurance, and an accompanying ranger for safety, and so on and so forth. And as I noted before, their definition of commercial includes freely giving your photo away for commercial use.
For those of you who think these requirements are horribly onerous and against all that is good in the world, and live in the US, I'd invite you to check your own state's film/video office to see what you're actually allowed to do. The "land of the free" may not be as free-as-in-Wikipedia as you think.
In my particular case, there are a number of facilities in this location, run by different state, federal or international entities. Things are further complicated by an additional rule, specific to the location, requiring permission from each facility being photographed (again, only in the case of commercial work - but again, that's defined in such a way that you can't give things to Wikipedia knowing that they will then allow commercial use.)
Honestly, I am sure the state doesn't mean to make life difficult for people like me - they just don't want a big crew traipsing around screwing up the land and tripping people with power cords or whatever. But they've evidently not found a way of casting a narrower net.
I love free use and all that. I'm also a photographer - not one who makes a living off it, but a moderately serious amateur who makes a little money now and then.
In my real job, I work somewhere where a permit is required for "commercial" photography or filming. I can take all the pictures I want for personal use, of course, and I can put pictures on my personal web page (or for that matter my work one), but unless I pony up the bucks for a permit (hundreds of dollars) I can't profit in any way, nor (and here's the clincher) can I give the photos for free to someone else who profits in any way from them.
There is a Creative Commons license (actually, lots of them) for things like this - the -nc- (non-commercial) ones. Unfortunately, last time I looked at Wikipedia, they insisted on a license allowing all uses, including commercial uses.
So as an amateur who doesn't want or need to make money off pictures of where I work, to upload a picture of my workplace (unsurprisingly, I have plenty, many of them quite good) I would have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a permit, then allow anyone and everyone do do whatever they want with my picture, including making money off it. So not only am I basically releasing it to the public domain, I'm paying out of pocket for the right to let other people make money off it.
If Wikipedia has changed their terms and are allowing cc-*-nc-* licensing, then I'll be very happy to stand corrected. If they still require licensing of all uses including commercial ones then I'm sorry, but I simply can't play that game.
"Welcome to NASA. We're going to send you into space, but this involves sitting you atop something that's basically a big stick of explosives. We're aiming for a controlled burn, and most of the time we get that part right, but as you're probably aware, every now and then something does blow the heck up.
Now, as you might imagine, if you are sitting atop a big stick of explosives, and it blows the heck up, you probably go with it. We're going to try to give you some kind of an out so that the explosives can blow up without you doing the same, but we want you to know it's not really going to make your odds all that much better."
I mean, seriously, folks. People don't sign up to be astronauts without grasping that there's a very real risk of death at pretty much every point in the mission.
The reasons, mechanics and social workings of our process have never been detailed outside the project, but now will be, hopefully providing some insight to others who face delays and quality issues with their own product lines.
He's clearly talking about Microsoft here, but why would he want to help them?
There are a lot of people who work in science education and public outreach. Staff at museums and planetaria, for example. Outreach people from research facilities (here on Mauna Kea, just about every observatory has official outreach people). And people who just think what they do is so fun and cool they want to share it with people.
I'm fortunate enough to work in astronomy, and I love bringing my daughter up to the visitor station for stargazing or hiking, or video-chatting with her while operating or observing. I also volunteer at the visitor station, lead tours of the summit, and generally "reach out" to anyone who's interested. I don't get any observing time on the 8-meter I operate, but I just got offered some time on a 2-meter and am going to work with my daughter, my nephew and my neighbors' kids to come up with a project.
These are 8-14 year olds, so they can probably weigh in on whether we should look at asteroids, kuiper belt objects, supernovae, black holes, or whatever. But I started in the field when my daughter was 5, and even though the first few years she was mostly just wanting to look at stuff in the sky, and not caring so much about what it actually was, she's grown up knowing that her dad gets to do really cool stuff, instead of just sitting in a cubicle. Probably also doesn't hurt that she has autographed photos of a couple NASA astronauts she's met.:)
There are a lot of science outreach activities in our town, like AstroDay and Onizuka Science Day and robotics competitions and all that... plus public talks, the world's first 3-D planetarium, and... okay, okay, the whole farkin' island is one giant playground for any kid (or adult) who's into natural sciences at all.
Find your local science museums or science centers or observatories or planetaria or whatever, find out who handles the local robotics competition, etc. Plenty of unknown heroes out there.
Oh, one word of advice, though: don't expect the kids to go for your favorite science. I may be an astro-geek, and her mom's a social scientist, but my daughter tends more toward chemistry.
It's also possible to update a Satnav with new data if roads change, or new ones are built. Most people's car-atlases are obsolete if more than a few years old - meaning we have to replace them regularly to keep up-to-date. While the cost is small, it adds up with a new atlas every couple of years.
"possible" doesn't mean it's done in a timely manner. The folks who provide street data for Google Maps, for example, take years to add new streets in my town, and even existing streets that've been there as long as I can remember show up wrong, or don't show up (despite being clearly visible in the satellite imagery layer), while dirt roads off in the jungle used only by the National Guard for training show up just fine.
In this town (and, I suspect, many others) local knowledge is still important.
Your 17" CRT probably had a visible area of about 16" and a case of 18-19". A nice 20" widescreen 1680x1050 LCD really won't eat up all that much space on your desk.:)
Yeah, something solid-state, definitely. I was thinking SDHC 32GB cards... but those work out to a little under 64g/TB, so microSD is a lot lighter. You could even throw in one microSD-to-SD adapter and still be lighter.;)
Hey, since you work for NAOJ, perhaps you know somebody who actually speaks Japanese?
Quite a lot of somebodies actually. But that was true before I worked for them; there are tons of international students here from Japan (and I have Japanese cousins).
If so, please ask them what the literal translation of "Suburu" actually is. If my "5 brothers" story is nonsense, I'd love to know for sure.
The explanation I've heard is that it translates as "to (come/bring/tie/bind) together." Think of how the ancients would have perceived the stars in the Pleiades, all bundled together when all the other stars around them are more spread out.
Most myths I could find that made reference to a number at all stuck with 7 whatevers.
Slashdot Mirror
I have nightmarish pictures popping into my head of a waterfall of ethernet cables spewing from this with user's ports un-numbered with no network diagrams.
I think this scenario is precisely why BOFHs have PFYs.
Since my daughter was around 6, I've routinely made up answers that sound plausible at first but are clearly wrong if anyone over 5 thinks about them for a few seconds. She does the whole "thanks! ... um, wait, that's not right!" reaction, and I give her the right answers.
I work in science, so I want her to know science... but I also want her to think critically and know when someone's BS'ing her. :)
If you can find your way to Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii, we have:
- 'Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaii - first planetarium in the world to have full-dome 3D projection. It's a bit of an unusual place as the exhibit space deals both with astronomy and Hawaiian culture (yes, the signage is bilingual.)
- Mauna Kea Observatories and the Ellison Onizuka Center for International Astronomy's visitor station - rent a 4WD and catch a free tour of something extremely large and shiny. Weekends, it's the 10-meter Keck I telescope, tour meets at the visitor station at 1pm; weekdays, Japan's 8-meter Subaru telescope* offers tours; reserve yours on www.subarutelescope.org. After the tour, hang around the visitor station at 9200 feet for stargazing.
- Hawaii Volcanoes National Park - active volcanoes, of course. 28 miles south of Hilo.
- NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory, where they've done the atmospheric CO2 measurements for many years. www.mlo.noaa.gov has info on viisting.
Those are the first few things that come to mind... Hilo also has the base facilities for the CalTech Submillimeter Observatory, Gemini North, UK Infrared Telescope, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, Subaru Telescope, NASA Infra-Red Telescope Facility, Harvard-Smithsonian Submillimeter Array and the UH 2.2-meter telescope, and NOAA's (small) Mokupapapa educational center about the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument; Waimea (north part of the island) has the Keck and Canada-France-Hawaii base facilities. Kona side has the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii (NELHA); I haven't been there.
If you have any marine geeks, we have snorkeling; plant geeks we have rainforests; avian geeks we have hard-to-find endemic native birds... life is like one long natural-sciences field trip here.
*which I call "work"
If a black rectangular box - even a somewhat shiny one - strikes you as an example of aesthetics, you really need to pause "2001," lock the screen, step away from your Linux box, go up the stairs out of your mom's basement, put on some sunglasses and sunscreen and go spend some time in the big room with the bright lights and the blue ceiling.
Find some people on the street - people whose life does not revolve around Linux systems of their own construction - and ask them whether they think a black box, shiny or not, has any beauty to it, compared to products that they personally own or use.
A business to asking someone to keep quiet in order to have a problem resolved is pretty arrogant.
To honest consumers like you and me and them? Sure. But the article notes that this is more common on older iPods (imagine that - fancy newfangled batteries are more prone to trouble as they get older?) and from a corporate lawyer's viewpoint, having settlements and their terms made public only increases the risk of people running 250V through their years-old iPods in hopes of getting a shiny new one.
The Times has learnt that the company would offer the family a full refund only if they were willing to sign a settlement form. The proposed agreement left them open to legal action if they ever disclosed the terms of the settlement.
I don't see where it says they can't say the iPod exploded.
I do see where it says they can't disclose the terms of the settlement, which is absolutely normal and common as far as settlement language goes.
Was there something newsworthy here that I missed?
There's been buzz this week about the labels having finally persuaded Apple to offer a digitally-distributed "album" including liner notes, videos, ring tones, etc.
So if you're the labels, you create the digital package, let Apple (and presumably others, either right away or down the line) distribute a gazillion copies at no incremental cost to you... and you ship a container-load of CDs to WalMart for people who're still using 25-year-old technology.
Looks like they're just preparing for the shift away from rotating-spindle physical media. :)
When they started trying to be the anti-Google, and be as evil as possible. I still remember the time they sent me alarmingly-worded letters about the need to renew a couple domains with them... shortly after I transferred those domains to another registrar.
I've figured all along I was just one of many who were happy to be rid of them. Today? Doubly so.
I'm glad to see Greenpeace finish griping about Apple's failure to publish the "precautionary principle" (in Greenpeace-approved wording) on its web site, like every good environmental NGO does... and get around to pointing fingers at the real purveyors of plastic junk. :)
Trucks carrying "oversized loads" are more likely to have difficulties than other trucks.
Same as it's always been.
I'm confident I can get much higher speeds than that out of a laser...
So 1 in roughly every 11 million iPods has this sort of problem.
Out of curiosity, are there other products that burst into flames spontaneously at rates lower than 1 in every 11 million? I'm just thinking that if I bought 11 million of anything - including fire extinguishers - I wouldn't be terribly surprised if one went *FOOM!* one day.
It's a bit more complicated than that; I've posted additional details in a reply elsewhere in the thread. Thanks for your thoughtful responses, though.
Wow, someone who actually knows something about the limitations that exist on commercial photography. Thanks. :)
For the others: it's not just "my workplace" that's at ods with Wikipedia. The building where I work sits on state (aka "public") land, in the US. Yes, anyone and their dog can quite easily wander up outside it and take photos for personal use. However, the state - like virtually every state in the US - requires permits for commercial photographers and/or film crews, and liability insurance, and an accompanying ranger for safety, and so on and so forth. And as I noted before, their definition of commercial includes freely giving your photo away for commercial use.
For those of you who think these requirements are horribly onerous and against all that is good in the world, and live in the US, I'd invite you to check your own state's film/video office to see what you're actually allowed to do. The "land of the free" may not be as free-as-in-Wikipedia as you think.
In my particular case, there are a number of facilities in this location, run by different state, federal or international entities. Things are further complicated by an additional rule, specific to the location, requiring permission from each facility being photographed (again, only in the case of commercial work - but again, that's defined in such a way that you can't give things to Wikipedia knowing that they will then allow commercial use.)
Honestly, I am sure the state doesn't mean to make life difficult for people like me - they just don't want a big crew traipsing around screwing up the land and tripping people with power cords or whatever. But they've evidently not found a way of casting a narrower net.
I love free use and all that. I'm also a photographer - not one who makes a living off it, but a moderately serious amateur who makes a little money now and then.
In my real job, I work somewhere where a permit is required for "commercial" photography or filming. I can take all the pictures I want for personal use, of course, and I can put pictures on my personal web page (or for that matter my work one), but unless I pony up the bucks for a permit (hundreds of dollars) I can't profit in any way, nor (and here's the clincher) can I give the photos for free to someone else who profits in any way from them.
There is a Creative Commons license (actually, lots of them) for things like this - the -nc- (non-commercial) ones. Unfortunately, last time I looked at Wikipedia, they insisted on a license allowing all uses, including commercial uses.
So as an amateur who doesn't want or need to make money off pictures of where I work, to upload a picture of my workplace (unsurprisingly, I have plenty, many of them quite good) I would have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a permit, then allow anyone and everyone do do whatever they want with my picture, including making money off it. So not only am I basically releasing it to the public domain, I'm paying out of pocket for the right to let other people make money off it.
If Wikipedia has changed their terms and are allowing cc-*-nc-* licensing, then I'll be very happy to stand corrected. If they still require licensing of all uses including commercial ones then I'm sorry, but I simply can't play that game.
But they spell it a little different.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=vineland
Here's the straight-talk version:
"Welcome to NASA. We're going to send you into space, but this involves sitting you atop something that's basically a big stick of explosives. We're aiming for a controlled burn, and most of the time we get that part right, but as you're probably aware, every now and then something does blow the heck up.
Now, as you might imagine, if you are sitting atop a big stick of explosives, and it blows the heck up, you probably go with it. We're going to try to give you some kind of an out so that the explosives can blow up without you doing the same, but we want you to know it's not really going to make your odds all that much better."
I mean, seriously, folks. People don't sign up to be astronauts without grasping that there's a very real risk of death at pretty much every point in the mission.
The reasons, mechanics and social workings of our process have never been detailed outside the project, but now will be, hopefully providing some insight to others who face delays and quality issues with their own product lines.
He's clearly talking about Microsoft here, but why would he want to help them?
How do you say "you're doing it wrong" in their local language?
There are a lot of people who work in science education and public outreach. Staff at museums and planetaria, for example. Outreach people from research facilities (here on Mauna Kea, just about every observatory has official outreach people). And people who just think what they do is so fun and cool they want to share it with people.
I'm fortunate enough to work in astronomy, and I love bringing my daughter up to the visitor station for stargazing or hiking, or video-chatting with her while operating or observing. I also volunteer at the visitor station, lead tours of the summit, and generally "reach out" to anyone who's interested. I don't get any observing time on the 8-meter I operate, but I just got offered some time on a 2-meter and am going to work with my daughter, my nephew and my neighbors' kids to come up with a project.
These are 8-14 year olds, so they can probably weigh in on whether we should look at asteroids, kuiper belt objects, supernovae, black holes, or whatever. But I started in the field when my daughter was 5, and even though the first few years she was mostly just wanting to look at stuff in the sky, and not caring so much about what it actually was, she's grown up knowing that her dad gets to do really cool stuff, instead of just sitting in a cubicle. Probably also doesn't hurt that she has autographed photos of a couple NASA astronauts she's met. :)
There are a lot of science outreach activities in our town, like AstroDay and Onizuka Science Day and robotics competitions and all that... plus public talks, the world's first 3-D planetarium, and... okay, okay, the whole farkin' island is one giant playground for any kid (or adult) who's into natural sciences at all.
Find your local science museums or science centers or observatories or planetaria or whatever, find out who handles the local robotics competition, etc. Plenty of unknown heroes out there.
Oh, one word of advice, though: don't expect the kids to go for your favorite science. I may be an astro-geek, and her mom's a social scientist, but my daughter tends more toward chemistry.
It's also possible to update a Satnav with new data if roads change, or new ones are built. Most people's car-atlases are obsolete if more than a few years old - meaning we have to replace them regularly to keep up-to-date. While the cost is small, it adds up with a new atlas every couple of years.
"possible" doesn't mean it's done in a timely manner. The folks who provide street data for Google Maps, for example, take years to add new streets in my town, and even existing streets that've been there as long as I can remember show up wrong, or don't show up (despite being clearly visible in the satellite imagery layer), while dirt roads off in the jungle used only by the National Guard for training show up just fine.
In this town (and, I suspect, many others) local knowledge is still important.
Your 17" CRT probably had a visible area of about 16" and a case of 18-19". A nice 20" widescreen 1680x1050 LCD really won't eat up all that much space on your desk. :)
If you can't trust a car dealer to be well-versed in astronomy and Asian mythology, who can you trust?!
Yeah, something solid-state, definitely. I was thinking SDHC 32GB cards... but those work out to a little under 64g/TB, so microSD is a lot lighter. You could even throw in one microSD-to-SD adapter and still be lighter. ;)
Hey, since you work for NAOJ, perhaps you know somebody who actually speaks Japanese?
Quite a lot of somebodies actually. But that was true before I worked for them; there are tons of international students here from Japan (and I have Japanese cousins).
If so, please ask them what the literal translation of "Suburu" actually is. If my "5 brothers" story is nonsense, I'd love to know for sure.
The explanation I've heard is that it translates as "to (come/bring/tie/bind) together." Think of how the ancients would have perceived the stars in the Pleiades, all bundled together when all the other stars around them are more spread out.
Most myths I could find that made reference to a number at all stuck with 7 whatevers.