Why do you think blue isn't picked up by your eyes as well? DUH! WAVELENGTH!
Blue does not focus at the same distance as the other colors, by enough of a margin to make excess blue make images seem fuzzy.
The reason the eye is less sensitive to blue is that there are far fewer blue senstive cones than red or green. These blue cones are actually more sensitive to light than the red or green ones, but their deficit in numbers more that conteracts this.
Additionally most blue cones are outside the fovea (the bit of the eye that has the highest density of colour perception cells) so they are thinly spread, and this spread makes the resolution of the blue image poor.
But even this is not the end of the story - the brain does all sorts of visual image processing tricks and the blue signal seems to be amplified to compensate.
Finally the focus bit - blue has a different focus to red and green in the eye, so the image will always be a bit blurred. This is probably the reason why there are so few cones in the fovea - the image would be blurred anyway and your vision would not improve even if you increased the number of cones.
It's flaming a perfectly sensible comment which pointed out that you can't rate a movie (i.e. rank it in comparison with other movies) unless you have watched lots of movies
No - the original comment stated that you should not be allowed to rate a movie, not that such ratings were not sensible. Thus my "pompous" comment, which I think is completely deserved. Not allowing people to rate movies because they are somehow not qualified is, frankly, bonkers. It is up to the person reading the ratings to exercise judgement about who is doing the rating.
And what does it mean "to rate" a movie? To me that means saying how entertained I was by the movie: "I rate that as most enjoyable - 9/10". Or alternatively, it can mean to rank so "I rate that movie better than last weeks offering". But under this new bizarre rule that you need to have watched a hundred years of movies, I wouldn't be allowed to make the second comment. Get real.
Movies are both entertainment and craft. Enjoyment (and rating) of the entertainment side can be carried out totally independently of the craft side. Enjoyment of the entertainment is a personal feeling. A good gauge of this is I probably like a film if someone, who likes the type of films I like, liked it too.
On the craft side there is certainly pleasure to be had in watching and understanding the development of techniques over the lifetime of movies. Anybody who tried to rate a film as influential or significant without a good grounding in the history of film should be mocked. But this does not detract, reduce, or disallow his entitlement to express publically their valid opinion on how entertained they were by a particular movie.
Oh - and I bet that everybody who moaned about my original comment being overrated is a film buff. It's just a hunch.
Not exactly. The BBC is a weird hybrid between a business and a public service. They are of course interested in cost, but profit is not a primary driver (go to the BBC web site and count the ads - there are exactly none).
My wife and a few of my friends work for the BBC (all in IT, but different departments) so here's my informed take on the situation. There is no Ubermind supporting anything software wise at the BBC. They pick the best available tool for the job, especially in the public facing side. They needed streaming media - Real was the choice at the time. Now, after a few years, they are reviewing that choice, and looking at the alternatives. So don't read too much into it.
What is good is that they are neutral - for a lot of applications they have assessed the best tool to be open source or free software. Some of the software that runs the digital TV interactive services runs on Linux of some variety (some is also NT). Their main website (IIRC) runs on Apache.
So, if you get to the stage that the neutral BBC takes a long, deep look at the software then you can a least be comfortable with the knowledge that it's a contender.
No one should be allowed to rate movies until one has seen a broad enough range of movies to make a valid judgement.......
Only then can a reasonable judgement of what is really "the best" be offered.
Wow, pompous'r'us. To paraphrase,
You can't know if you enjoyed a movie unless you have watched lots of movies.
Or you can't know if you've enjoyed a meal unless you've eaten in thousands of resturants.
Or you can't know if you've enjoyed a walk unless you've walked in hundreds of countries.
Or you can't know if you've enjoyed a sunset unless you've seen thousands.
You must be an expert to make these judgements because otherwise you're not qualified. And god knows what would happen if we let unqualified people judge movies/walks/meals/sunsets. People would watch other people enjoyed instead what the experts told them was good - and that would be anarchy.
Although on peripherally relevant to the story (it is to do with the DMCA) I'm a little surprised that this has not had a story of it's own on slashdot yet.
Um, except for the fact that oxygen isn't actually flammable
A classic experiment that I saw at the pyromaniacs lecture when I was at university was to burn oxygen. Yeah - we all went "huh?!" too. What the nutte^Wlecturer did was fill a large glass tube with hydrogen and light top of it (so we had a huge hydrogen flame from the top) and then introduce oxygen at the bottom of it so there was a mini-flame in the large tube that was burning oxygen.
The point is that if you lived in a hydrogen atmosphere you would consider oxygen very flammable indeed.
Classic lecture - everyone was just about deaf leaving it. There are hours of fun to be had with liquid oxygen, not to mention what you can do with aluminium, rust and a little magnesium.
why would it be safe to store hydrogen in my house?
You would be amazed at how safe hydrogen is. When I was working in reseach we had an outside gas bottle room which consisted of rows of bottles plumbed in and gas lines going to the relevent lab. Some of these were hydrogen and it was decided to fit a hydrogen sensor to detect leaks and shut it down automatically when the hydrogen concentation reached about 50% of the lower explosive limit.
Anyway, this was installed and seemed to be working. We then decided to test it by gently cracking open a hydrogen bottle under the sensor (which was on the ceiling) and watching the output. Nothing. We opened it a bit more - still nothing. Finally we opened up full and only then did the sensor start to register (but nowhere near the set point).
What was happening was that because the room was well ventilated, the hydrogen dispersed so quickly that it only just got high enough to show on the detector. Any leak apart from a catastrophic failure would be safe.
Propane, on the other hand, is a floor hugger and does not disperse very well. You also beed a lower concentration of it to go bang. So if this leaks it tends to hang about the cylinder and you quickly have a bomb waiting to go off.
Very good piece of technology. Could be a bit better: being able to swap hydrogen canisters on the fly to give unlimited life; or being able to plumb in a hydrogen supply. This gives the possibility of using solar power during the day the power a computer and generate hydrogen, and to run of the hydrogen at night in a closed cycle. This would be better than lead acid batteries as these do not have a particularly high power density.
The cost of the hydrogen is outrageous - you can buy a J cylinder (big) of hydrogen for about $100.
Despite what the article says there is no way that this is the first commercial fuel cell - see this page for a manufacturer near you - but it is a great indication that they will soon be mainstream.
Tom Clancy is widely acknowledged as an incredible researcher
He is? I remember reading Rainbow Six (about 500 pages too long) and was stunned by the poor quality of research, particularly in the background stuff such as British Pubs, Football teams, local dialect, and the rest. There is also the gross error in the plot: The Aussie Olymipics were taking place in their winter - the cooling system that is a vital plot element would not be required.
So I'd take what he writes as fiction - not as an authoritative source.
Still, no doubt these will be dismissed with a "Yes, but apart from the solar cells, the fuel cells, the biomass research, the wind energy, and forestry, what have the oil companies ever done for renewable energy?".
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....and a lot of knowledge will get you a career
I know - I have two degrees in physics. I have worked (as a Researcher) on engine measurement (including the temperature and pressure inside a functioning engine) and on fuel cells (catalyst poisoning). So I have lots of knowledge.
And I will say this again - your statement
but fuel cells do have the same limitations -- known as Carnot efficiency, btw.
is flat out, completely, one hundered precent, unequivocally, and without doubt, absolutely wrong.
Fuel Cells are not 100% efficient and never will be.
Depends what you mean by efficiency - they can have efficiencies of 124% (if you pick your reactants correctly).
And before I go I should point out that fuel cells are hot not because they produce waste heat (although this may be a factor), but because they are heated. They work at the temperature that the catalyst operates most effectively.
Say a company has spent 5 years integrating NT systems into their department. That usually means it will take another 5 years to get rid of it.
Mod up the parent, somebody, because this is the crux of the matter.
Where I work there are approx 4000 staff in about 40 offices worldwide. Office numbers range from ~10 to ~1000. We have about 250 production servers all running NT (or 2000). The cost per head for MS is about $20 per person per year in support (this is the money we pay MS, not how much support costs), and about $400 per person one off payment for licencing (OS + office + CALS) - this does us for any related product XP (office, workstation and - I think - server).
Our goal is to cut that spend. But the licence money is dead money - we don't get a refund if we don't use the products. We also don't get a reduction in direct MS support costs if we have, say, 100 of the 250 servers running Linux.
Where we can make a start is nibbling round the edges - for example proxy server is not included, so we can use Linux and Squid. Except (SFAIK) Squid does not integrate with things like Websense which we need to block sites (nothing draconian - mainly web e-mail to stop viruses and web porn to stop lawsuits).
And we could use Apache, but that is a direct increase in support costs. IIS is free (or rather, we're paying for it whether we use it or not, and we'd have to pay more to use something else) however crap it is - and as our servers don't accept anonymous connections the Code Reds had little effect (so no convenient lever there either).
And then we come to the real killer - our business systems (which are extremely good - easily the best of any company I've worked for) are built about MS products - IIS, index server, Exchange, MS SQL held together with NT authentication. It would (will) be a huge undertaking to move these to anything else.
There are chinks of light in this - the MS product line is changing, and a lot of the code is being rewritten anyway, so rewritting in the direction of vanilla or standards will help now (so redoing the MSSQL app to use only vanilla SQL will take an important step towards portability -it may not perform as well, but hell - this is a time when hardware can and should be thrown at a problem).
Another killer is Exchange - there is nothing I can go to management and say "We should look to replace Exchange with XXXXXX" (and, before there is a flurry of "sendmails", Exchange is not just e-mail - in fact think of exchange as an enterprise PDA that also does e-mail).
Anyway, a few thoughts about something that has been exercising my mind a lot recently - any other ideas to get out of the MS lock-in?
There is a very good reason not to do this - efficiency. An internal combustion engine is, deep down, simply a heat engine (that is, it converts heat to useful work). It is governed by the laws that tell you the theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine (which is (T[burn]-T[input])/T[burn] where T[burn] is the temperature of the combustion, and T[input] is the temperature of the combustion mixture beforehand). Typically you will get about 30% - 40% from an internal combustion engine.
A fuel cell (despite the name) is not a heat engine and does not have this fundamental limitation, so the maximum efficiency is 100%.
Incidently, fuel cells actually predate the internal combustion engine (1839 vs 1859).
Boy, you guys are NICE re-imaging their drives!Here at work if WE screw up one of our drives (yes, I'm a developer), they come in with a boot CD, install Windows ONLY, and WE are expected to set the rest up ourselves!
Seems strange. It's quicker (by far) to use ghost or something similar. And if you use imaging you end up with a fully functional (business) system. For instance on the old compaq I use as a desktop it takes the morning to reinstall Windows 2000 and Office 2000. It would probably take at least another 1/2 day to get all the standard and custom apps set up. I can ghost to the same setup in 40 mins.
Much as we'd like to (and it is something that we have considered) we haven't found a quick developers solution because just about every developers' machine is unique in most tools (and no, we're not stupid enough to say "This is the company editor, you will use this even if it makes you less productive"). The best we can do is make sure that when a machine is hosed they can get up to a known standard condition quickly containing everything they need as an employee, and that they have easy access (via CD or network share) to any tools that they then have to re-install.
In your situation if there is a single tool, application, or setting that has to be installed or set before your machine is functional, then your IT support department should get their arses kicked: they are costing themselves and every employee time and money, and that is not acceptable. There would be a management decision to be taken if IT support are saving money at the cost of some developer's time, but dollars to doughnuts that isn't the case here. It looks like a "you've screwed up, therefore you have to be punished" mindset, which sucks.
As the sort of person who designs these policies I have to say that there is not enough information to give you an answer, so if you don't mind I'll illustrate with a few principles that I work to.
Surprisingly enough, nobody implements such a policy because they are evil incarnate - you may not believe this, but it is true. The reason that policies are setup like this is purely to save money. And the money is saved because a huge proportion of support time is spent fixing PCs that users have wreaked because they've installed that cute new application.
This leads directly to the BOFH approach to policy - nail it down, and nail it down hard. Don't even let them log on without a letter from the Pope. This is a stage one policy. Support calls drop dramatically, user productivity is zero.
Now, a bit of reality is introduced. People have to use their machines, so against our better judgement we let them log on. And print. And even save things to the hard disk. This is stage two: most people can do what they have to do, support calls rise a little.
Then you deal with the exceptions. Depending on the type of user the general restrictions are lifted. There may be strings attached (such as the screw up and we'll only reimage) or maybe IT will arrange proper support for the application etc.
The point to remember (and so many people forget, especially people in IT) is IT support is not the business. If you are in the business of making widgets, or writing code, then IT support do not do this - they exist to help you do this. They exist solely to allow the business to function more effectively. They are "facilitators" (to use a horrible word). They provide a service.
If that service prevents the business doing things that are required for the business the the service is substandard and needs to be replaced. In this case that service is a policy, and it need to be replaced. I have designed a policy for devolopers, and the policy is
1. You get a standard PC with the standard loadset, and admin rights on the local box.
2. If you screwup we will only reimage.
3. If you repeated screwup we will still reimage, but we will start charging you.
4. All software to be purchased (if costware) and registered (registerware) via {specific person}.
Lockdown policies are loved bu IT departments, but if it stops you (or anyone) doing legitimate work then it is broken and needs fixing.
Support is the main problem, but not only for the obvious reason. Take, for example, StarOffice. We looked at the pros and cons of switching to this and it fell at the first hurdle, which is almost the first question you ask when thinking about bringing a product in: "Who is going to support it?"
Putting StarOffice into Jobsearch engines produce zero hits. Nobody wants to hire people with StarOffice skills. Equally, no one wants to learn StarOffice skills as nobody is hiring. Nice idea but dead at step one. Exactly the same with Bynari - no market in these skills either.
I know it's a vicious circle but it's one that I cannot, as a solutions provider to my company, break.
Another argument is training. Every new person that walks through the door at my company has MS Office amd MS Windows skills. Time to get the up and running is about 1 hr to teach them the company specific apps. If we used Linux/StarOffice training time is couple of days to get them to a sensible level. Time is money, and if you are learning how to use a wordprocessor you are not bringing home the bacon.
So vicious circle number two.
Everytime an alternative is looked at it comes up against these two problems.
Well, we only have the original post to go on, so ingnorance is really unavoidable. Bit..
Don't confuse activity with productivity
When someone is playing chess continually (which is what the original post was talking about) then that is not productive - so don't confuse goofing off with work. Any manager worth his salt will realise that fovouritism (in allowing one member of the team to goof off) will create envy and bad feeling in the rest of the team (moreso if there are rumours that the goofee is being well paid for his laziness).
The reason he sits idle is because he fixes problems quickly, and often before they occur.
No - the reason he sits there idle is that he is goofing off. Are there tasks that are job related that he could be doing instead?
Well
1) Using his higher knowledge level to train the other members of the team.
2) Anticipating problems before they bite.
3) Keeping abreast of developments in his field of expertise
4) Expanding his area of expertise
5) Networking to look for new areas to supply with his expertise
6) Learning the business that the company is in to enable him to anticipate new requests
7) Speaking with vendors to maintain links and have knowledge of their short, medium, and long term product strategies
8) Looking for replacements for your current vendors
9) Reading newsgroups to get other users views on current issues and problems with the software you support.
10) Documenting all of the above.
for starters.
I guess you're one of these typical managers
I'm not a manager
who likes to see a sysadmin running around madly from place to place, not realizing that all he's doing is restarting servers instead of figuring out why they're going down in the first place and fixing the real problem.
No - but if I see a room full of people surfing and gaming, I will start to wonder exactly what we are paying them for (and I use the word we deliberately here - I work in an employee owned firm and too many system admins playing chess means less money for me).
Anyway, go ahead and confront the competent sysadmin. You'll find that you won't be able to fire him, because he'll quit and get a new job where he's appreciated before you even finish your first sentence.
Several things about this: if you think that asking someone to actually do some work instead of playing chess is confrontational then you will find the world a very aggressive place. I have been in places where prima donnas have behaved like the man described here, and they have been approached about it - "Shape up or ship out" couched in various levels of euphemism. If they do ship out (and they usually do) they generally aren't missed, and usually the team they leave is happier and more productive. Oh - and if the rest of the team can't fix the problems (this is system admining and not rocket science, don't forget) you need to have a good look at your hiring practices.
Newton said "If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Taken out of context it seems like a noble thing to say, but it was actually intended as an insult to Robert Hooke his contemporary and hated rival, who was very short and by all accounts sensitive about the fact.
Nope - this is (probably) a fallacy. See this for the details.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you think blue isn't picked up by your eyes as well? DUH! WAVELENGTH!
Blue does not focus at the same distance as the other colors, by enough of a margin to make excess blue make images seem fuzzy.
The reason the eye is less sensitive to blue is that there are far fewer blue senstive cones than red or green. These blue cones are actually more sensitive to light than the red or green ones, but their deficit in numbers more that conteracts this.
Additionally most blue cones are outside the fovea (the bit of the eye that has the highest density of colour perception cells) so they are thinly spread, and this spread makes the resolution of the blue image poor.
But even this is not the end of the story - the brain does all sorts of visual image processing tricks and the blue signal seems to be amplified to compensate.
Finally the focus bit - blue has a different focus to red and green in the eye, so the image will always be a bit blurred. This is probably the reason why there are so few cones in the fovea - the image would be blurred anyway and your vision would not improve even if you increased the number of cones.
It's flaming a perfectly sensible comment which pointed out that you can't rate a movie (i.e. rank it in comparison with other movies) unless you have watched lots of movies
No - the original comment stated that you should not be allowed to rate a movie, not that such ratings were not sensible. Thus my "pompous" comment, which I think is completely deserved. Not allowing people to rate movies because they are somehow not qualified is, frankly, bonkers. It is up to the person reading the ratings to exercise judgement about who is doing the rating.
And what does it mean "to rate" a movie? To me that means saying how entertained I was by the movie: "I rate that as most enjoyable - 9/10". Or alternatively, it can mean to rank so "I rate that movie better than last weeks offering". But under this new bizarre rule that you need to have watched a hundred years of movies, I wouldn't be allowed to make the second comment. Get real.
Movies are both entertainment and craft. Enjoyment (and rating) of the entertainment side can be carried out totally independently of the craft side. Enjoyment of the entertainment is a personal feeling. A good gauge of this is I probably like a film if someone, who likes the type of films I like, liked it too.
On the craft side there is certainly pleasure to be had in watching and understanding the development of techniques over the lifetime of movies. Anybody who tried to rate a film as influential or significant without a good grounding in the history of film should be mocked. But this does not detract, reduce, or disallow his entitlement to express publically their valid opinion on how entertained they were by a particular movie.
Oh - and I bet that everybody who moaned about my original comment being overrated is a film buff. It's just a hunch.
The BBC is of course a business
Not exactly. The BBC is a weird hybrid between a business and a public service. They are of course interested in cost, but profit is not a primary driver (go to the BBC web site and count the ads - there are exactly none).
My wife and a few of my friends work for the BBC (all in IT, but different departments) so here's my informed take on the situation. There is no Ubermind supporting anything software wise at the BBC. They pick the best available tool for the job, especially in the public facing side. They needed streaming media - Real was the choice at the time. Now, after a few years, they are reviewing that choice, and looking at the alternatives. So don't read too much into it.
What is good is that they are neutral - for a lot of applications they have assessed the best tool to be open source or free software. Some of the software that runs the digital TV interactive services runs on Linux of some variety (some is also NT). Their main website (IIRC) runs on Apache.
So, if you get to the stage that the neutral BBC takes a long, deep look at the software then you can a least be comfortable with the knowledge that it's a contender.
No one should be allowed to rate movies until one has seen a broad enough range of movies to make a valid judgement. ......
Only then can a reasonable judgement of what is really "the best" be offered.
Wow, pompous'r'us. To paraphrase,
You can't know if you enjoyed a movie unless you have watched lots of movies.
Or you can't know if you've enjoyed a meal unless you've eaten in thousands of resturants.
Or you can't know if you've enjoyed a walk unless you've walked in hundreds of countries.
Or you can't know if you've enjoyed a sunset unless you've seen thousands.
You must be an expert to make these judgements because otherwise you're not qualified. And god knows what would happen if we let unqualified people judge movies/walks/meals/sunsets. People would watch other people enjoyed instead what the experts told them was good - and that would be anarchy.
Think of it this way - one of the wisest men in physics (reputedly), Eistein, was frequently seen wandering about in odd socks.
Although on peripherally relevant to the story (it is to do with the DMCA) I'm a little surprised that this has not had a story of it's own on slashdot yet.
It's on The Register
I doubt that you could plumb hydrogen to it from high pressure tanks because of safety concerns.
You can definitely do this (some gas chromatographs are plumbed into a hydrogen supply for example).
I sure wouldn't want to work near a tank of hydrogen.
But you probably own a device that has a tank full of much more dangerous stuff - it's called a car.
Um, except for the fact that oxygen isn't actually flammable
A classic experiment that I saw at the pyromaniacs lecture when I was at university was to burn oxygen. Yeah - we all went "huh?!" too. What the nutte^Wlecturer did was fill a large glass tube with hydrogen and light top of it (so we had a huge hydrogen flame from the top) and then introduce oxygen at the bottom of it so there was a mini-flame in the large tube that was burning oxygen.
The point is that if you lived in a hydrogen atmosphere you would consider oxygen very flammable indeed.
Classic lecture - everyone was just about deaf leaving it. There are hours of fun to be had with liquid oxygen, not to mention what you can do with aluminium, rust and a little magnesium.
why would it be safe to store hydrogen in my house?
You would be amazed at how safe hydrogen is. When I was working in reseach we had an outside gas bottle room which consisted of rows of bottles plumbed in and gas lines going to the relevent lab. Some of these were hydrogen and it was decided to fit a hydrogen sensor to detect leaks and shut it down automatically when the hydrogen concentation reached about 50% of the lower explosive limit.
Anyway, this was installed and seemed to be working. We then decided to test it by gently cracking open a hydrogen bottle under the sensor (which was on the ceiling) and watching the output. Nothing. We opened it a bit more - still nothing. Finally we opened up full and only then did the sensor start to register (but nowhere near the set point).
What was happening was that because the room was well ventilated, the hydrogen dispersed so quickly that it only just got high enough to show on the detector. Any leak apart from a catastrophic failure would be safe.
Propane, on the other hand, is a floor hugger and does not disperse very well. You also beed a lower concentration of it to go bang. So if this leaks it tends to hang about the cylinder and you quickly have a bomb waiting to go off.
Very good piece of technology. Could be a bit better: being able to swap hydrogen canisters on the fly to give unlimited life; or being able to plumb in a hydrogen supply. This gives the possibility of using solar power during the day the power a computer and generate hydrogen, and to run of the hydrogen at night in a closed cycle. This would be better than lead acid batteries as these do not have a particularly high power density.
The cost of the hydrogen is outrageous - you can buy a J cylinder (big) of hydrogen for about $100.
Despite what the article says there is no way that this is the first commercial fuel cell - see this page for a manufacturer near you - but it is a great indication that they will soon be mainstream.
Pablum eh? Someone has been reading word of the day, methinks. A true sciolist, sir. I fleer at you.
Tom Clancy is widely acknowledged as an incredible researcher
He is? I remember reading Rainbow Six (about 500 pages too long) and was stunned by the poor quality of research, particularly in the background stuff such as British Pubs, Football teams, local dialect, and the rest. There is also the gross error in the plot: The Aussie Olymipics were taking place in their winter - the cooling system that is a vital plot element would not be required.
So I'd take what he writes as fiction - not as an authoritative source.
Could it be that the big oil interests have no interest in a cheap efficient environmentally friendly source of power ?
You have to wonder sometimes when good technology is ignored, is there some sort of hidden oil-company aganda ?
And this got labelled informative? Sheesh.
Here you can see a list of solar cell manufacturers - at least two oil companies (BP and Shell) are on it.
Here is a view from the EU about the future of big business in photovoltaics.
Here is an account of Shell's involvement in Fuel Cells and Hydrogen power in general.
Here is an account of some of Shell's involvement with biomass power generation.
Here is an overview.
Still, no doubt these will be dismissed with a "Yes, but apart from the solar cells, the fuel cells, the biomass research, the wind energy, and forestry, what have the oil companies ever done for renewable energy?".
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....and a lot of knowledge will get you a career
I know - I have two degrees in physics. I have worked (as a Researcher) on engine measurement (including the temperature and pressure inside a functioning engine) and on fuel cells (catalyst poisoning). So I have lots of knowledge.
And I will say this again - your statement
but fuel cells do have the same limitations -- known as Carnot efficiency, btw.
is flat out, completely, one hundered precent, unequivocally, and without doubt, absolutely wrong.
Fuel Cells are not 100% efficient and never will be.
Depends what you mean by efficiency - they can have efficiencies of 124% (if you pick your reactants correctly).
And before I go I should point out that fuel cells are hot not because they produce waste heat (although this may be a factor), but because they are heated. They work at the temperature that the catalyst operates most effectively.
Thanks for this - we have no particular attachment to websense (only the functionality) so I'll download this and runit through it's paces.
Say a company has spent 5 years integrating NT systems into their department. That usually means it will take another 5 years to get rid of it.
Mod up the parent, somebody, because this is the crux of the matter.
Where I work there are approx 4000 staff in about 40 offices worldwide. Office numbers range from ~10 to ~1000. We have about 250 production servers all running NT (or 2000). The cost per head for MS is about $20 per person per year in support (this is the money we pay MS, not how much support costs), and about $400 per person one off payment for licencing (OS + office + CALS) - this does us for any related product XP (office, workstation and - I think - server).
Our goal is to cut that spend. But the licence money is dead money - we don't get a refund if we don't use the products. We also don't get a reduction in direct MS support costs if we have, say, 100 of the 250 servers running Linux.
Where we can make a start is nibbling round the edges - for example proxy server is not included, so we can use Linux and Squid. Except (SFAIK) Squid does not integrate with things like Websense which we need to block sites (nothing draconian - mainly web e-mail to stop viruses and web porn to stop lawsuits).
And we could use Apache, but that is a direct increase in support costs. IIS is free (or rather, we're paying for it whether we use it or not, and we'd have to pay more to use something else) however crap it is - and as our servers don't accept anonymous connections the Code Reds had little effect (so no convenient lever there either).
And then we come to the real killer - our business systems (which are extremely good - easily the best of any company I've worked for) are built about MS products - IIS, index server, Exchange, MS SQL held together with NT authentication. It would (will) be a huge undertaking to move these to anything else.
There are chinks of light in this - the MS product line is changing, and a lot of the code is being rewritten anyway, so rewritting in the direction of vanilla or standards will help now (so redoing the MSSQL app to use only vanilla SQL will take an important step towards portability -it may not perform as well, but hell - this is a time when hardware can and should be thrown at a problem).
Another killer is Exchange - there is nothing I can go to management and say "We should look to replace Exchange with XXXXXX" (and, before there is a flurry of "sendmails", Exchange is not just e-mail - in fact think of exchange as an enterprise PDA that also does e-mail).
Anyway, a few thoughts about something that has been exercising my mind a lot recently - any other ideas to get out of the MS lock-in?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but fuel cells do have the same limitations -- known as Carnot efficiency, btw.
No they don't - see here
You are talking drivel about the engine efficienies also - see here
My source for info? a good introductory thermodynamics class.
Introductory? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Just make the goddamn engine run on hydrogen
There is a very good reason not to do this - efficiency. An internal combustion engine is, deep down, simply a heat engine (that is, it converts heat to useful work). It is governed by the laws that tell you the theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine (which is (T[burn]-T[input])/T[burn] where T[burn] is the temperature of the combustion, and T[input] is the temperature of the combustion mixture beforehand). Typically you will get about 30% - 40% from an internal combustion engine.
A fuel cell (despite the name) is not a heat engine and does not have this fundamental limitation, so the maximum efficiency is 100%.
Incidently, fuel cells actually predate the internal combustion engine (1839 vs 1859).
Boy, you guys are NICE re-imaging their drives!Here at work if WE screw up one of our drives (yes, I'm a developer), they come in with a boot CD, install Windows ONLY, and WE are expected to set the rest up ourselves!
Seems strange. It's quicker (by far) to use ghost or something similar. And if you use imaging you end up with a fully functional (business) system. For instance on the old compaq I use as a desktop it takes the morning to reinstall Windows 2000 and Office 2000. It would probably take at least another 1/2 day to get all the standard and custom apps set up. I can ghost to the same setup in 40 mins.
Much as we'd like to (and it is something that we have considered) we haven't found a quick developers solution because just about every developers' machine is unique in most tools (and no, we're not stupid enough to say "This is the company editor, you will use this even if it makes you less productive"). The best we can do is make sure that when a machine is hosed they can get up to a known standard condition quickly containing everything they need as an employee, and that they have easy access (via CD or network share) to any tools that they then have to re-install.
In your situation if there is a single tool, application, or setting that has to be installed or set before your machine is functional, then your IT support department should get their arses kicked: they are costing themselves and every employee time and money, and that is not acceptable. There would be a management decision to be taken if IT support are saving money at the cost of some developer's time, but dollars to doughnuts that isn't the case here. It looks like a "you've screwed up, therefore you have to be punished" mindset, which sucks.
Is that even legal?
Charging as in money - internal billing at xhrs per screwup
As the sort of person who designs these policies I have to say that there is not enough information to give you an answer, so if you don't mind I'll illustrate with a few principles that I work to.
Surprisingly enough, nobody implements such a policy because they are evil incarnate - you may not believe this, but it is true. The reason that policies are setup like this is purely to save money. And the money is saved because a huge proportion of support time is spent fixing PCs that users have wreaked because they've installed that cute new application.
This leads directly to the BOFH approach to policy - nail it down, and nail it down hard. Don't even let them log on without a letter from the Pope. This is a stage one policy. Support calls drop dramatically, user productivity is zero.
Now, a bit of reality is introduced. People have to use their machines, so against our better judgement we let them log on. And print. And even save things to the hard disk. This is stage two: most people can do what they have to do, support calls rise a little.
Then you deal with the exceptions. Depending on the type of user the general restrictions are lifted. There may be strings attached (such as the screw up and we'll only reimage) or maybe IT will arrange proper support for the application etc.
The point to remember (and so many people forget, especially people in IT) is IT support is not the business. If you are in the business of making widgets, or writing code, then IT support do not do this - they exist to help you do this. They exist solely to allow the business to function more effectively. They are "facilitators" (to use a horrible word). They provide a service.
If that service prevents the business doing things that are required for the business the the service is substandard and needs to be replaced. In this case that service is a policy, and it need to be replaced. I have designed a policy for devolopers, and the policy is
1. You get a standard PC with the standard loadset, and admin rights on the local box.
2. If you screwup we will only reimage.
3. If you repeated screwup we will still reimage, but we will start charging you.
4. All software to be purchased (if costware) and registered (registerware) via {specific person}.
Lockdown policies are loved bu IT departments, but if it stops you (or anyone) doing legitimate work then it is broken and needs fixing.
Support is the main problem, but not only for the obvious reason. Take, for example, StarOffice. We looked at the pros and cons of switching to this and it fell at the first hurdle, which is almost the first question you ask when thinking about bringing a product in: "Who is going to support it?"
Putting StarOffice into Jobsearch engines produce zero hits. Nobody wants to hire people with StarOffice skills. Equally, no one wants to learn StarOffice skills as nobody is hiring. Nice idea but dead at step one. Exactly the same with Bynari - no market in these skills either.
I know it's a vicious circle but it's one that I cannot, as a solutions provider to my company, break.
Another argument is training. Every new person that walks through the door at my company has MS Office amd MS Windows skills. Time to get the up and running is about 1 hr to teach them the company specific apps. If we used Linux/StarOffice training time is couple of days to get them to a sensible level. Time is money, and if you are learning how to use a wordprocessor you are not bringing home the bacon.
So vicious circle number two.
Everytime an alternative is looked at it comes up against these two problems.
And now offtopic, and it also has a troll moderation.
Slashdot moderation - chock full of surprises
How typically ignorant.
Well, we only have the original post to go on, so ingnorance is really unavoidable. Bit..
Don't confuse activity with productivity
When someone is playing chess continually (which is what the original post was talking about) then that is not productive - so don't confuse goofing off with work. Any manager worth his salt will realise that fovouritism (in allowing one member of the team to goof off) will create envy and bad feeling in the rest of the team (moreso if there are rumours that the goofee is being well paid for his laziness).
The reason he sits idle is because he fixes problems quickly, and often before they occur.
No - the reason he sits there idle is that he is goofing off. Are there tasks that are job related that he could be doing instead?
Well
1) Using his higher knowledge level to train the other members of the team.
2) Anticipating problems before they bite.
3) Keeping abreast of developments in his field of expertise
4) Expanding his area of expertise
5) Networking to look for new areas to supply with his expertise
6) Learning the business that the company is in to enable him to anticipate new requests
7) Speaking with vendors to maintain links and have knowledge of their short, medium, and long term product strategies
8) Looking for replacements for your current vendors
9) Reading newsgroups to get other users views on current issues and problems with the software you support.
10) Documenting all of the above.
for starters.
I guess you're one of these typical managers
I'm not a manager
who likes to see a sysadmin running around madly from place to place, not realizing that all he's doing is restarting servers instead of figuring out why they're going down in the first place and fixing the real problem.
No - but if I see a room full of people surfing and gaming, I will start to wonder exactly what we are paying them for (and I use the word we deliberately here - I work in an employee owned firm and too many system admins playing chess means less money for me).
Anyway, go ahead and confront the competent sysadmin. You'll find that you won't be able to fire him, because he'll quit and get a new job where he's appreciated before you even finish your first sentence.
Several things about this: if you think that asking someone to actually do some work instead of playing chess is confrontational then you will find the world a very aggressive place. I have been in places where prima donnas have behaved like the man described here, and they have been approached about it - "Shape up or ship out" couched in various levels of euphemism. If they do ship out (and they usually do) they generally aren't missed, and usually the team they leave is happier and more productive. Oh - and if the rest of the team can't fix the problems (this is system admining and not rocket science, don't forget) you need to have a good look at your hiring practices.
Newton said "If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Taken out of context it seems like a noble thing to say, but it was actually intended as an insult to Robert Hooke his contemporary and hated rival, who was very short and by all accounts sensitive about the fact.
Nope - this is (probably) a fallacy. See this for the details.