Yeah, and people used to think wolf's bane would keep werewolves at bay, garlic would keep vampires away, a good bleeding would cure what ails, and putting blood from one's gums on the north side of a mossed tree would cure a toothache.
People are a superstitious lot as a whole; for most people, it's because they can't be bothered to verify a statement's factuality. For everyone else, it's due to there simply not being enough time to verify the factuality of everything.
Eh... hot women that are easy to bed are more likely to be sluts, regardless of how good you are at 'acquiring' them. From a completely non-scientific assessment of people I know, the hot, slutty girls are (unless they're obviously kinky out of bed) tend to just lay there like slugs and let you do the work. Sure, it "does the job" but it's kinda discouraging and unexciting.
Yeah, I've never played with Elementals, though I've always thought it'd be fun. I suspect a good countermeasure would be - surprise! - to use more clan tech: small pulse lasers. Get four of 'em and they'd act more like a cutting laser than a pulse and a 'hit' would be less of an issue.
How do they fare against Streak SRMs? I'd imagine there's something in the clan arsenal to take 'em out. I know that in missions against Elementals in MW4, a couple MG hits will take 'em out without much complaining.
Now, a full Elemental Star would be a bit of a hassle, I think. Maybe something a Long Tom would have to handle?
That's not quite right -- the game is being set in 3015, which is before the Clan invasion, and so it's unlikely you'll see any Clan technology in the game.
WHich is, upon reflection, really pretty shitty and likely indicative of how customizable the weapon loadouts on the mechs will be. That was one of the things that made Mechwarrior 2 so awesome: it was damn customizable. Which would you rather have, an Cougar or a Jenner? Yeah, I'll take the Cougar, please!
While the MechCommander games largely sucked, that was one key aspect about them: you upgraded from IS to Clan hardware when you could, for a number of reasons: better designs (more maneuverable, usually), more weapon points, and omnipoints instead of hardwired points which could only take 1 or 2 weapon types.
No, most probably not. It might be possible, but...
Mechwarrior 2 came about when the average PC joystick was still pretty privative. I don't know if it was because of MechWarrior 2, or simply a coincidence (combined with a heightened emergence of a lot of flight sims at the time), but the Thrustmaster joysticks came to prevailance (and quality) directly after Mechwarrior 2 came out. Joysticks which came before were too primitive (without losing one's mind, at least): they simply didn't have enough buttons or axises.
For starters, the bare minimum needed to play with a joystick exclusively is one with 4 axises, at least one of which could not have a "bounce back" to center (for the throttle). That's not counting the additional 2 axises you'd need if you wanted to use jumpjets. Then you would need, at least, 8 or so additional buttons (which would need to be configured based on your gameplay method): group/chain fire toggle, fire group selection toggle, coolant eject, jumpjet "jump" (as opposed to using the JJs to skirt enemy fire), 2-3 for targeting and nav, and probably a couple others I'm forgetting.
The basic idea of the premise is that a PS2/3 controller isn't capable of playing the Mechwarrior 2 - 4 games with a traditional 2-handed gamepad - you'll have to keep switching back and forth between the gamepad and the keyboard to get the full range of functionality.
Oh, and expect to pay $50+ for a joystick worth having that is capable of effectively playing the Mechwarrior games: 6+1 axis, 12+ or so buttons (at least three of which being triggers) would be enough for keyboardless playing, I fathom. The only way you could do it w/ a gamepad is with modal keys, and I'm not sure how you'd do that with their existing engines.
Yep, MW2 had it set. I was pretty disappointed with MW3 and MW3 loadout ability. It was really restrictive compared to MW2. I couldn't use my favorite combinations.
I had a friend who loved the Jenner and, god forbid, the Uller for multiplayer. He'd strip the armor down to nothing, give it a handful of heatsinks and a jumpjet or two, boost up the engines to the max, and outfit it just a handful of small lasers. He was devistating against anything but other similarly equipped mechs: he'd avoid all incoming fire with finesse, get in close, and either get up underneath you and shoot the cockpit out (quickly) or follow you (if you were in a medium or other light mech) and shoot the backside middle of the chassis out. It was a really good technique, and he could do it while avoiding another mech as well.
In 3 and 4, a lot of the more esoteric combinations didn't really work. For that matter, it was largely a moot point; they'd changed the chassis on most mechs enough, as well as the general aiming and gameplay, that it didn't matter much. Pretty frustrating.
The other thing about 3 and 4 I didn't like was that LRMs weren't as effective for actual long-range use, it seemed.
Who said anything about reproduction or recall? We're talking about retention, here. The human brain supposedly retains pretty much everything ever added to it. It's our recall methods/ability which is lacking.
If however all 1 PB of data must be immediately available to your software, the weight gos up dramatically.
In the case of 3.5" SATA HDDs, that weight/cost should include a storage system that renders all the data available at the same time.
Yes, good point! I can't tell you how many times I thought "gee, I need instantaneous access to the entire tomb of the world's knowledge; I sure wish I had a couple thou card readers to make that possible!"
Actually, that's a lie. I'm pretty content with accessing the same data amounts I did 10-20 years ago "at the same time" - just quicker.
Most cars (in the US) aren't steel shelled anymore; they're either aluminum, plastic, or some combination thereof. About 1/4th of the body panels on my 2000 Focus are plastic, and the rest are (fairly thin) aluminum alloy of some sort. There are also a handful of more structural parts (grill and hood latch) which are steel undermesh with plastic.
Also, making a 2-passenger vehicle isn't going to sell well. Sure, it covers 80% of the conditions for half the people, but what about that 3rd passenger going to the bar, or the vast majority of people (in the US, anyway) who have children? It might make sense in Europe, but the biggest "vehicle problem" is in the US.
ICE are actually about 30-40% energy efficient in terms of the energy utilized to move the vehicle. I assume that was what you were referring to, unless you're under the presumption that a vehicle with an electric motor can weigh about 1.5x what the driver does.
This is how I'd start to approach making a modern street car more fuel efficient:
* start with a small sedan (Ford Focus, Honda Accord, etc.) * rip out anything unnecessary from the inside. This includes all the comfort electronics. Weight requires more energy, so remove as much as possible. * remove all unnecessary subsystems that leech from the alternator: air conditioning, power steering, ABS, etc. * remove the "emission control" measures, which seem to invariably sap a good 25%+ fuel efficiency. * add an HHO system and run the engine rich, either tricking the sensors or modifying the computer to ignore the high readings * if you plan on heavy city driving, add in the break energy collector and a fuel cell of some sort.
Bet you could get close to 100MPG if you did something like this. Too bad performance and fuel efficiency seems to drop off quickly if you go below a 4 cyl engine.
A driver of one of these would have significantly more safety on a motorcycle.
That thing, if t-boned by a motorcycle, would likely result in the driver dying. This thing has a curb weight of 243lb, which is 100lb less than a small non-highway motorcycle. Consider, also, that it's (likely steel- or aluminum- mesh substructure) carbon fiber: it's significantly less resistant to fracture than any metal (except maybe over-hardened iron).
Additionally, the driver's vantage point is low. Very low. Again, if hit by a motorcycle, the driver's head would be right at the bike's center of gravity. This is right at the "bumper" level of other 4-wheeled vehicles. The driver would be fucked.
Finally, this thing is unlikely to produce the noise that a motorcycle does (which adds to others' awareness of the biker), lacks the agility of a 2-wheel vehicle, and decreases the driver's visibility over what is available on a bike (due to the 'cockpit' as well as the low perspective). Driver competence aside, a motorcycle is safer.
Finally, there are a lot more drivers per capita in the US than in Europe. This might have something to do with the death rate (as well as the endemic nature of car ownership here). The bar is significantly lower for ownership, combined with the fact that the roads are likely much more full of cars as a result (and that people drive more often/regularly here) may lead to this statistical difference. If someone has a daily commute of 30+ miles each day - with tens of thousands of other people doing the same thing, rain or shine - the likelihood of an accident goes up.
As a parable, someone who gets certified to sky-dive and does it a handful of times isn't as likely to have a problem as someone who does it with regularity (say, someone in Airborne) due to the sheer number of times it's performed. Shit happens, and is more likely to happen with increased exposure.
I'd argue there's a problem with IE7 and 8 in general. I've seen a slight bump in the number of infected IE7 and IE8 malware infections lately; often, the infection isn't systemic, and can be avoided by not using IE (because using IE is impossible due to brokenness). Most clients will opt for using Firefox over having to have their whole system reinstalled.
Funny, then, that employers put the least common numbers of your SSN on your pay check (as if it were 'randomized' in the same fashion as a credit card, which until fairly recently was pretty damn easy to fake/guess as well).
I wouldn't be surprised that, in states with lower populations/birth rates, the ease of guessing a person's SSN increases. I remember comparing/talking about SSN with friends in high school; the numbers of the (admittedly small) sample of local-born friends were sequentially matched to their order of birth.
I'd not be surprised that if you were to get a hold of birth records somewhere for such local areas, with a single SSN/name as a base point, you'd be able to figure out (to fairly high certainty) the specific SSN for quite a few people.
Likewise, you could probably figure out people's SSN in a deterministic fashion through process of limitation: guess a dozen people's SSNs, and after the 3 that came back positive, you'd have narrowed a smaller set to work with.
NTFS does data integrity, but it doesn't do stable as well as FAT32.
The real problem with this is that he wants to rely on RAID for loss prevention resulting from a hardware failure - verging on a 'backup replacement'. It's a bad idea for many reasons (as largely laid out in this post in the current thread).
If you want to do RAID and expect to use it effectively, you really need to consider using disks from different manufacturers and/or manufactured lots. Disks made at (essentially) the same time have the propensity to die at essentially the same time. Unless you're doing a hot spare, you run a non-significant chance of both disks failing before you can replace the first failed one.
RAID is good for one thing, and one thing only: marginal system redundancy. The value of RAID1 is negotiable, and in my opinion negligible once you consider that it's going to present a handful of irritations and problems. You're increasing complexity in more ways than just adding an extra disk; the hardware and/or software mechanisms for providing that RAID increase as well.
Now, don't get me wrong. I put RAID1 in my systems and it's "saved" me a couple times (allowing me to get the system up and running again without having to rebuilt the system from scratch). But I've also had a handful of irritating problems with RAID: no RAID I've seen (hw or sw) handles power failures well; Linux mdraid will occasionally have to rebuild the array after a normal reboot; and the various hw raid implementations in 'consumer' level (ie SATA/IDE) controllers are crap in so many ways.
If you do RAID1, don't do it without a bona-fide form of data loss prevention (ie, a backup).
I do this, too. In a familiar environment I've always been very good at pitch-dark navigation. It's immediately difficult after turning off the lights (seems it takes a moment or three for the brain to switch over), but I'll use the sounds of the creaking floor (and so on) for navigation.
When I was a teen I used to walk around in our basement in the dark. I didn't use a clicking or 'shh' sound, I used more of a guttural, deep grunt (a throat growl, if you will). I've got very high frequency sensitivity, so I don't know why I prefer the lower tone, but it works if you're not intimate with the area or have no other sound to tell you where you are.
In an average house, if you know the floor plan and there's an appliance on, it's pretty trivial to navigate by it (provided you know where the appliance is!)
It'd be really interesting to hone this technique to avoid small childrens' toys, though. That'd be really nice.
The vast majority of people in the decision level ring in corporate IT these days were around at the nitty gritty level when Norton AV was a decent product. So they remember that and (likely) have little first-hand experience with the crap it's become due to Symantec.
There's also just sheer momentum and advertising. Symantec is the 900lb gorilla, so everyone's aware of them. License upgrades are sometimes cheaper/more easily rationalized than switching to something else (especially when "your employees are skilled with Symantec, though!" reaches an exec's ear).
I can't speak for him, but I've seen a handful of Vista machines with IE8 (and up-to-date Symantec software) very severely broken by malware. Often, it's to the point where IE is not only useless but does not function at all: crash, hang, etc. on startup and so on. Even after removing a dozen or so 'add-on bars' it's still broken.
I disagree. The "scientific method" relies upon an initial (and usually unacknowledged) hypothesis. This hypothesis is usually acquired non-scientifically - ie, basic human observation and, more often than not, intuition.
Acting on these observations happened long before we had a "method" for it, and I've no doubt Newton, Galileo, and Einstein had to start with an initial "oh, gee, look at that" which was contrary to the contemporary thought of the day.
As for my initial post, as to how the scientific method is bunk: most of modern science in several disciplines is based off of a handful of unverified (and improbable/impossible) postulations which have been accepted as a verified belief (what scientific communities so often presumptuously refer to as 'fact').
Case in point: ice age glaciers and their current movement. Geology, biology, archeology, and I'm sure other disciplines. Egyptology is, as I understand things, somewhat prone to this. They all rely upon the time scales set forth by these ideas, leading to the dismissal of much more convincing evidence (ie cataclysm as a means of change, which is readily documented by the naked eye on a daily basis). Very often, it seems theories ignore the world around them and rely almost completely on aggregate theories. (For instance, if the pyramids were constructed with primitive means, where are the roadways utilized to move their 17+ ton stones? Someone who studied more than the ancient discoveries of others - say, an engineer - would see this endemic problem with contemporary theory right off the bat, but gets dismissed due to not being educated/not having the correct discipline background.)
So that's what I mean by the 'scientific method' being bunk. It's very often abused and incorrectly 'used', and holds no resemblance in practice to the actual process. You've got to test your theories and assumptions or you're not doing science any more than some nut who says the earth is only 6,000 years old due to Biblical addition.
Yes, I believe in intelligent design (in some guise or another) and cataclysm as a means of change. But that's because I've seen too many counter-examples invalidating the contemporary theories. If those contemporary theories were correct, you would not have to try to shoehorn a new discovery into it; the theory would instead be verified by the new discovery. If your theory does not cover a condition, you need to find a new theory.
One of the biggest fallacies I'm aware of that still has wide acceptance is the "ice cap"/ice age/glacial theory (as there is at least enough evidence in contrary, never mind common sense, to suggest otherwise). Somehow, glaciers are supposed to 'flow' uphill, towards the equator. Somehow, there are glaciers near the equator in many locations where they should not exist (unless you work off the assumption that the earth has had multiple different polar regions throughout history, at which time the 'alternate polls' formed ice caps). So many theories and disciplines rely on the gradual-change theories shackled with the ice age 'fact' that it seems to me have led to a lot of incorrect conclusions.
I guess internal re-compensation, or compensation from Arabs for similar (and usually more brutal) slavery wouldn't have had a significance, either? Here's a hint: African slavery occurred for (at least) hundreds of years prior to Europeans accepting the tradition.
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Yeah, and people used to think wolf's bane would keep werewolves at bay, garlic would keep vampires away, a good bleeding would cure what ails, and putting blood from one's gums on the north side of a mossed tree would cure a toothache.
People are a superstitious lot as a whole; for most people, it's because they can't be bothered to verify a statement's factuality. For everyone else, it's due to there simply not being enough time to verify the factuality of everything.
I wonder how many of these SoundSense users will end up having the "awooaaaa" sound of a booting Mac get classified as a "significant sound".
Eh... hot women that are easy to bed are more likely to be sluts, regardless of how good you are at 'acquiring' them. From a completely non-scientific assessment of people I know, the hot, slutty girls are (unless they're obviously kinky out of bed) tend to just lay there like slugs and let you do the work. Sure, it "does the job" but it's kinda discouraging and unexciting.
The results of this study are somewhat disturbing. For instance: how did they determine the attractiveness of non-human females?
Yeah, I've never played with Elementals, though I've always thought it'd be fun. I suspect a good countermeasure would be - surprise! - to use more clan tech: small pulse lasers. Get four of 'em and they'd act more like a cutting laser than a pulse and a 'hit' would be less of an issue.
How do they fare against Streak SRMs? I'd imagine there's something in the clan arsenal to take 'em out. I know that in missions against Elementals in MW4, a couple MG hits will take 'em out without much complaining.
Now, a full Elemental Star would be a bit of a hassle, I think. Maybe something a Long Tom would have to handle?
That's not quite right -- the game is being set in 3015, which is before the Clan invasion, and so it's unlikely you'll see any Clan technology in the game.
WHich is, upon reflection, really pretty shitty and likely indicative of how customizable the weapon loadouts on the mechs will be. That was one of the things that made Mechwarrior 2 so awesome: it was damn customizable. Which would you rather have, an Cougar or a Jenner? Yeah, I'll take the Cougar, please!
While the MechCommander games largely sucked, that was one key aspect about them: you upgraded from IS to Clan hardware when you could, for a number of reasons: better designs (more maneuverable, usually), more weapon points, and omnipoints instead of hardwired points which could only take 1 or 2 weapon types.
No, most probably not. It might be possible, but...
Mechwarrior 2 came about when the average PC joystick was still pretty privative. I don't know if it was because of MechWarrior 2, or simply a coincidence (combined with a heightened emergence of a lot of flight sims at the time), but the Thrustmaster joysticks came to prevailance (and quality) directly after Mechwarrior 2 came out. Joysticks which came before were too primitive (without losing one's mind, at least): they simply didn't have enough buttons or axises.
For starters, the bare minimum needed to play with a joystick exclusively is one with 4 axises, at least one of which could not have a "bounce back" to center (for the throttle). That's not counting the additional 2 axises you'd need if you wanted to use jumpjets. Then you would need, at least, 8 or so additional buttons (which would need to be configured based on your gameplay method): group/chain fire toggle, fire group selection toggle, coolant eject, jumpjet "jump" (as opposed to using the JJs to skirt enemy fire), 2-3 for targeting and nav, and probably a couple others I'm forgetting.
The basic idea of the premise is that a PS2/3 controller isn't capable of playing the Mechwarrior 2 - 4 games with a traditional 2-handed gamepad - you'll have to keep switching back and forth between the gamepad and the keyboard to get the full range of functionality.
Oh, and expect to pay $50+ for a joystick worth having that is capable of effectively playing the Mechwarrior games: 6+1 axis, 12+ or so buttons (at least three of which being triggers) would be enough for keyboardless playing, I fathom. The only way you could do it w/ a gamepad is with modal keys, and I'm not sure how you'd do that with their existing engines.
Yep, MW2 had it set. I was pretty disappointed with MW3 and MW3 loadout ability. It was really restrictive compared to MW2. I couldn't use my favorite combinations.
I had a friend who loved the Jenner and, god forbid, the Uller for multiplayer. He'd strip the armor down to nothing, give it a handful of heatsinks and a jumpjet or two, boost up the engines to the max, and outfit it just a handful of small lasers. He was devistating against anything but other similarly equipped mechs: he'd avoid all incoming fire with finesse, get in close, and either get up underneath you and shoot the cockpit out (quickly) or follow you (if you were in a medium or other light mech) and shoot the backside middle of the chassis out. It was a really good technique, and he could do it while avoiding another mech as well.
In 3 and 4, a lot of the more esoteric combinations didn't really work. For that matter, it was largely a moot point; they'd changed the chassis on most mechs enough, as well as the general aiming and gameplay, that it didn't matter much. Pretty frustrating.
The other thing about 3 and 4 I didn't like was that LRMs weren't as effective for actual long-range use, it seemed.
Who said anything about reproduction or recall? We're talking about retention, here. The human brain supposedly retains pretty much everything ever added to it. It's our recall methods/ability which is lacking.
If however all 1 PB of data must be immediately available to your software, the weight gos up dramatically.
In the case of 3.5" SATA HDDs, that weight/cost should include a storage system that renders all the data available at the same time.
Yes, good point! I can't tell you how many times I thought "gee, I need instantaneous access to the entire tomb of the world's knowledge; I sure wish I had a couple thou card readers to make that possible!"
Actually, that's a lie. I'm pretty content with accessing the same data amounts I did 10-20 years ago "at the same time" - just quicker.
What was the point of this discussion, again? :P
A small motorcycle is hardly a monster truck. This thing would kill the driver in a 40mph curb collision.
Most cars (in the US) aren't steel shelled anymore; they're either aluminum, plastic, or some combination thereof. About 1/4th of the body panels on my 2000 Focus are plastic, and the rest are (fairly thin) aluminum alloy of some sort. There are also a handful of more structural parts (grill and hood latch) which are steel undermesh with plastic.
Also, making a 2-passenger vehicle isn't going to sell well. Sure, it covers 80% of the conditions for half the people, but what about that 3rd passenger going to the bar, or the vast majority of people (in the US, anyway) who have children? It might make sense in Europe, but the biggest "vehicle problem" is in the US.
ICE are actually about 30-40% energy efficient in terms of the energy utilized to move the vehicle. I assume that was what you were referring to, unless you're under the presumption that a vehicle with an electric motor can weigh about 1.5x what the driver does.
This is how I'd start to approach making a modern street car more fuel efficient:
* start with a small sedan (Ford Focus, Honda Accord, etc.)
* rip out anything unnecessary from the inside. This includes all the comfort electronics. Weight requires more energy, so remove as much as possible.
* remove all unnecessary subsystems that leech from the alternator: air conditioning, power steering, ABS, etc.
* remove the "emission control" measures, which seem to invariably sap a good 25%+ fuel efficiency.
* add an HHO system and run the engine rich, either tricking the sensors or modifying the computer to ignore the high readings
* if you plan on heavy city driving, add in the break energy collector and a fuel cell of some sort.
Bet you could get close to 100MPG if you did something like this. Too bad performance and fuel efficiency seems to drop off quickly if you go below a 4 cyl engine.
The Chinese wouldn't buy the Hummer because they've already stolen (and re-implemented) the design. Why buy something you can steal?
A driver of one of these would have significantly more safety on a motorcycle.
That thing, if t-boned by a motorcycle, would likely result in the driver dying. This thing has a curb weight of 243lb, which is 100lb less than a small non-highway motorcycle. Consider, also, that it's (likely steel- or aluminum- mesh substructure) carbon fiber: it's significantly less resistant to fracture than any metal (except maybe over-hardened iron).
Additionally, the driver's vantage point is low. Very low. Again, if hit by a motorcycle, the driver's head would be right at the bike's center of gravity. This is right at the "bumper" level of other 4-wheeled vehicles. The driver would be fucked.
Finally, this thing is unlikely to produce the noise that a motorcycle does (which adds to others' awareness of the biker), lacks the agility of a 2-wheel vehicle, and decreases the driver's visibility over what is available on a bike (due to the 'cockpit' as well as the low perspective). Driver competence aside, a motorcycle is safer.
Finally, there are a lot more drivers per capita in the US than in Europe. This might have something to do with the death rate (as well as the endemic nature of car ownership here). The bar is significantly lower for ownership, combined with the fact that the roads are likely much more full of cars as a result (and that people drive more often/regularly here) may lead to this statistical difference. If someone has a daily commute of 30+ miles each day - with tens of thousands of other people doing the same thing, rain or shine - the likelihood of an accident goes up.
As a parable, someone who gets certified to sky-dive and does it a handful of times isn't as likely to have a problem as someone who does it with regularity (say, someone in Airborne) due to the sheer number of times it's performed. Shit happens, and is more likely to happen with increased exposure.
I'd argue there's a problem with IE7 and 8 in general. I've seen a slight bump in the number of infected IE7 and IE8 malware infections lately; often, the infection isn't systemic, and can be avoided by not using IE (because using IE is impossible due to brokenness). Most clients will opt for using Firefox over having to have their whole system reinstalled.
Funny, then, that employers put the least common numbers of your SSN on your pay check (as if it were 'randomized' in the same fashion as a credit card, which until fairly recently was pretty damn easy to fake/guess as well).
I wouldn't be surprised that, in states with lower populations/birth rates, the ease of guessing a person's SSN increases. I remember comparing/talking about SSN with friends in high school; the numbers of the (admittedly small) sample of local-born friends were sequentially matched to their order of birth.
I'd not be surprised that if you were to get a hold of birth records somewhere for such local areas, with a single SSN/name as a base point, you'd be able to figure out (to fairly high certainty) the specific SSN for quite a few people.
Likewise, you could probably figure out people's SSN in a deterministic fashion through process of limitation: guess a dozen people's SSNs, and after the 3 that came back positive, you'd have narrowed a smaller set to work with.
NTFS does data integrity, but it doesn't do stable as well as FAT32.
The real problem with this is that he wants to rely on RAID for loss prevention resulting from a hardware failure - verging on a 'backup replacement'. It's a bad idea for many reasons (as largely laid out in this post in the current thread).
If you want to do RAID and expect to use it effectively, you really need to consider using disks from different manufacturers and/or manufactured lots. Disks made at (essentially) the same time have the propensity to die at essentially the same time. Unless you're doing a hot spare, you run a non-significant chance of both disks failing before you can replace the first failed one.
RAID is good for one thing, and one thing only: marginal system redundancy. The value of RAID1 is negotiable, and in my opinion negligible once you consider that it's going to present a handful of irritations and problems. You're increasing complexity in more ways than just adding an extra disk; the hardware and/or software mechanisms for providing that RAID increase as well.
Now, don't get me wrong. I put RAID1 in my systems and it's "saved" me a couple times (allowing me to get the system up and running again without having to rebuilt the system from scratch). But I've also had a handful of irritating problems with RAID: no RAID I've seen (hw or sw) handles power failures well; Linux mdraid will occasionally have to rebuild the array after a normal reboot; and the various hw raid implementations in 'consumer' level (ie SATA/IDE) controllers are crap in so many ways.
If you do RAID1, don't do it without a bona-fide form of data loss prevention (ie, a backup).
I do this, too. In a familiar environment I've always been very good at pitch-dark navigation. It's immediately difficult after turning off the lights (seems it takes a moment or three for the brain to switch over), but I'll use the sounds of the creaking floor (and so on) for navigation.
When I was a teen I used to walk around in our basement in the dark. I didn't use a clicking or 'shh' sound, I used more of a guttural, deep grunt (a throat growl, if you will). I've got very high frequency sensitivity, so I don't know why I prefer the lower tone, but it works if you're not intimate with the area or have no other sound to tell you where you are.
In an average house, if you know the floor plan and there's an appliance on, it's pretty trivial to navigate by it (provided you know where the appliance is!)
It'd be really interesting to hone this technique to avoid small childrens' toys, though. That'd be really nice.
The vast majority of people in the decision level ring in corporate IT these days were around at the nitty gritty level when Norton AV was a decent product. So they remember that and (likely) have little first-hand experience with the crap it's become due to Symantec.
There's also just sheer momentum and advertising. Symantec is the 900lb gorilla, so everyone's aware of them. License upgrades are sometimes cheaper/more easily rationalized than switching to something else (especially when "your employees are skilled with Symantec, though!" reaches an exec's ear).
I can't speak for him, but I've seen a handful of Vista machines with IE8 (and up-to-date Symantec software) very severely broken by malware. Often, it's to the point where IE is not only useless but does not function at all: crash, hang, etc. on startup and so on. Even after removing a dozen or so 'add-on bars' it's still broken.
I disagree. The "scientific method" relies upon an initial (and usually unacknowledged) hypothesis. This hypothesis is usually acquired non-scientifically - ie, basic human observation and, more often than not, intuition.
Acting on these observations happened long before we had a "method" for it, and I've no doubt Newton, Galileo, and Einstein had to start with an initial "oh, gee, look at that" which was contrary to the contemporary thought of the day.
As for my initial post, as to how the scientific method is bunk: most of modern science in several disciplines is based off of a handful of unverified (and improbable/impossible) postulations which have been accepted as a verified belief (what scientific communities so often presumptuously refer to as 'fact').
Case in point: ice age glaciers and their current movement. Geology, biology, archeology, and I'm sure other disciplines. Egyptology is, as I understand things, somewhat prone to this. They all rely upon the time scales set forth by these ideas, leading to the dismissal of much more convincing evidence (ie cataclysm as a means of change, which is readily documented by the naked eye on a daily basis). Very often, it seems theories ignore the world around them and rely almost completely on aggregate theories. (For instance, if the pyramids were constructed with primitive means, where are the roadways utilized to move their 17+ ton stones? Someone who studied more than the ancient discoveries of others - say, an engineer - would see this endemic problem with contemporary theory right off the bat, but gets dismissed due to not being educated/not having the correct discipline background.)
So that's what I mean by the 'scientific method' being bunk. It's very often abused and incorrectly 'used', and holds no resemblance in practice to the actual process. You've got to test your theories and assumptions or you're not doing science any more than some nut who says the earth is only 6,000 years old due to Biblical addition.
Yes, I believe in intelligent design (in some guise or another) and cataclysm as a means of change. But that's because I've seen too many counter-examples invalidating the contemporary theories. If those contemporary theories were correct, you would not have to try to shoehorn a new discovery into it; the theory would instead be verified by the new discovery. If your theory does not cover a condition, you need to find a new theory.
One of the biggest fallacies I'm aware of that still has wide acceptance is the "ice cap"/ice age/glacial theory (as there is at least enough evidence in contrary, never mind common sense, to suggest otherwise). Somehow, glaciers are supposed to 'flow' uphill, towards the equator. Somehow, there are glaciers near the equator in many locations where they should not exist (unless you work off the assumption that the earth has had multiple different polar regions throughout history, at which time the 'alternate polls' formed ice caps). So many theories and disciplines rely on the gradual-change theories shackled with the ice age 'fact' that it seems to me have led to a lot of incorrect conclusions.
I guess internal re-compensation, or compensation from Arabs for similar (and usually more brutal) slavery wouldn't have had a significance, either? Here's a hint: African slavery occurred for (at least) hundreds of years prior to Europeans accepting the tradition.