Agreed on the datbases... although I've heard some interesting ideas w/ using database disks for backups of other systems.
Basically, you spread your database across the inner 10% of the disks... then use the other 90% for your backups of other systems. When the databases aren't at peak, you run the backups.
This way, you spread the database across 10x the number of spindles.
You could probably back up the database itself to the disks, but you'll want some logic to make sure there's more than one disk group, so you don't back up a given partition back to the same disk.
The problem is that modern use has deviated from the original meaning of the word (which meant to reduce by 1/10th... not *to* one tenth, but *by* 1/10th... it was a punishment in to the Roman Army in which one of every 10 soldiers was killed)
Modern usage would have you think that it means to reduce to near nothing, rather than simply losing 10%.
Yes, their estimate of wages is likely high... however, what they didn't include:
Management to hire, train and oversee the people who review the content
Benefits for all of these people.
A place for them to work
Computer for them to work on
Sufficient internet bandwidth to view all of the videos
Power to run the computers, networking gear, plus cooling so they don't overheat.
In the US, the 'burdened cost' for an employee is about twice what their wages are. It's possible that if you were to outsouce, the multiplier would go up (cost of the computers haven't decreased; and the costs of running that much bandwidth to a place that won't have the same infrastructure)
So yes, the analysis is absurd, but I'm guessing it's closer than most people would think. (if they're getting paid US$15k/year, it might be closer to US$45k burdened cost, so ~ 1/4 the cost, not ~1/12 the cost)
As best that I can tell for the 'safe search' filters for the images -- they guess based on how much flesh tones are in the images.
So if you paint all of your actors and actresses blue and make avatar porn, it might not get caught automatically. (of course, someone might still report it, and get it taken down)
I assume that he'd use something that's already been tested, like LiquidFeedback, which was developed by members of German Pirate Party.... or any of the other ones in the list of active or related projects listed at metagovernment.org
Or, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman were right, and it's just a sign that God has a sense of humor:
Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it was created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old.
These dates are incorrect.
Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760 B.C. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508 B.C.
These suggestions are also incorrect.
Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 B.C., at exactly 9:00 A.M., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh.
This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour.
The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.
I'm currently working on a government contract, and the prime contractor is a 'small, minority owned' business. Before that, the prime was a 'small, minority woman owned' business.
I don't think the current one is 'woman owned', but the one before was the president's wife held 51% of the company. (and they got rather litigious when they lost on the re-compete)
But here's the thing -- set asides mean that you're competing in a completely different contest. What I'd much prefer seeing is for them to treat it more like giving a few points to the other side.
I don't know how much it's really worth to them, but they could come up with some sort of a preference system. For example, if we had:
Then a local, minority woman owned small business would be compared at 5% lower than their bid amount to someone who didn't meet any of those. Of course, I think the rules for 'small business' needs to be tightned up (SBA's definition is *huge*), and I wouldn't mind seeing it being a scale. (you're 51% woman owned? then you qualify for a 0.51% (51% of 1%) advantage)
My former boss's wife was working on her psych major -- she explained everyone in her class was basically trying to figure out what was wrong with them.
And that's not to say that Heather didn't have quirks, either -- she had an obsession for buying stuff at auctions... especially jewlery and shiny things... but she never wore jewelry... and then she found eBay, and it was all downhill from there. (this was the late 1990s)
I've been on grant review boards -- a large number of the grants submitted make an assumption that they'll publish a paper a year, and include the 'page fees' (or whatever is appropriate in their field) in their grant proposal to cover the publishing of the research information.
Now, conversely, I really liked Jason Priem and Bradley M. Hemminger's recent article, 'Decoupling the Scholarly Journal', which talks about the basic tasks that a journal does, and how they don't all need to be done by a single entity. (I admit, I've only scanned it, I need to go back and read it more thoroughly, so hopefully I haven't misrepresented it)
The problem with your assumption that journals are covered by subscription fees is that the rates for library subscriptions has been rising so significantly that many are rebelling, and just dropping the subscriptions entirely. Some have designated the savings to go into a pool to pay author fees, but I'm also personally against the current model of author-pays-on-acceptance. (as it means they're subsidizing all of the rejections; it's been pointed out that journals pride themselves on exclusivity ("we only accept 2%"), so are unlikely to establish fees on submission as it may pre-filter the rejections)
My company's password policy is that you're not allowed to use password vault software.
I wish I were kidding.
Oddly, though, the new policy came out a month or two after the xkcd comic, and they *did* make a special exemption for using dictionary words and the other password complexity rules provided the password was of sufficient length.
And I think most of the systems will lock out after between 3-5 failed attempts, but they'll automatically unlock after 5-15 minutes, so you don't have to call in.
Hybrids are going to have an advantage in stop-and-go traffic, due to the regenerative braking and lower speeds.
The TDI is going to have an advantage in long distance driving, even with the same engine, as it doesn't have the weight of two power systems.
So, if you're going to be doing 90% of your traffic as highway traffic, and you time your trips to avoid congestion, the hybrid will *never* be as efficient as a lighter small engine car.
(I don't own a hybrid, but I was on the GW Solar Car Team, when it placed first in the 1996 World Solar-Car Rallye... and yes, we were in the 'junior' class, but came out ahead of all vehicles in the higher classes)
Of course, you might've been sacrificing speed for accuracy in that 3 year estimate.
(and for all of the nay sayers -- I could see this being great for monte carlo simulations or other modeling where you're dealing with so much imprecise inputs that minor error's not going to be significant)
I've looked into full-home surge protectors that install next to the fuse box...
When I had my house converted to circuit breakers, it was less than $100 for them to add the whole-house surge, but the electrician was already there for the panel replacement. The whole job was only $700, but that was a good decade or so ago.
It just slots into two of the circuit breaker spaces, so I'm assuming it's just open the panel cover and swap 'em out should something go wrong. (mind you, he also drove in a couple of new grounding rods outside, and connected it all up, so the installation was a little more than just slotting them in)
Whole house brownouts on the other hand... that's something I've still got issues with, but I'm not willing to put up the money for a giant flywheel.
The centering bits are a problem, but for the others -- use a CSS pre-processor. (Sass, LESS, Scaffold, Compass, Stylus,etc.)
There are ones that are more Ruby-ish, or Python-ish, etc. Some can calculate colors (darken, lighten, blend, etc.), but almost all let you set things to variables so they can be set in one place and used multiple times.
(and none of this is really new -- I know folks that were using ColdFusion, PHP or even Perl to generate their CSS a good decade or so ago... it's a page of text, and pretty much anything that can generate an HTML page can generate CSS too)
I do a fair bit of work in IDL (writing software for the scientists to use)... but there are days that I want to stab myself repeatedly with a fork. (I've asked for ages for native SOAP/WSDL support... they insist they have it, because they can do the OGC services... but those aren't the SOAP calls I'm trying to make)
If you don't interact with their XML *just* right, it can cause some horrible problems where the cleanup time increases exponentially with the number of elements. And try to do it all with regex? Well, their regex parser is a joke, too.
They *finally* introduced a concept of lists (and empty lists!), associative arrays, and null in IDL8... but I've got to support IDL7, too. (and of course, IDL8 save files aren't backwards compatable with IDL7, so that caused all sorts of problems, too).
And if they weren't so litigious, I could've used PDL to extract what I need from the save files, but that boat's sailed... and I haven't gotten enough time to learn enough Python to redo those cron jobs using IDLSave.
(and yes, there's still quite a bit of Fortran... and C, GDL, PDL, Matlab, SciPy, etc... but not a single damned person that I know of using Ruby for science in our group)
And how many do you need? Only one to disprove your claim that there aren't any. To claim 'tons of'... more than that. (and in that case, showing where they won doesn't show that there aren't any that they lost)
(and look, I'm supportive of some of the stuff Google does... but your selective listing is insinuating that they've never done illegal stuff, which was the original claim... and doing illegal stuff, and being found guilty by the courts are two different things, as everyone tries to settle out of court to avoid setting a legal precident)
In general, the 'we're going to the Moon, and then to Mars' was the start of it... Added the stuff that NASA had to do, but no money to pay for it, so other departments got canibalized.
There was a lot of press about the folks in Florida who lost their jobs after the last shuttle lanuch... but nothing about the people who were let go years before because their discipline had cuts so that the shuttle could continue going up past its planned life without any funding to pay for it.
And for JWST, there was a bit of a flap back in September... search for 'james webb space telescope controversy' in your preferred search engine.
then you put in an ILL (Inter-Library Loan) request... but typically, most libraries have a budget for getting requested books, and if they think the book will be of general interest (and c'mon, it's an award winning children's book), they'll just go and buy a copy.
And if you're really set on comic books, ask if the children's librarian can make a recommendation. Even a small library (6-8 librarians) will typically have a dedicated children's librarian. (or just look through the 'E' section, and you'll find lots of good stuff)
When you look at the apprentice / journeyman / master system, you're supposed to get broader experience in the journeyman phase... you go place to place, learning from other experts.
When you've got the team lead who's been trained internally and has known nothing other than working at that one place, I see that as a red flag. If you ask them why they're doing something a specific way, and they give an answer that's effectively 'because that's the way we've always done it', it's a sign that they're not going to be receptive to new ideas.
(and yet, at the same time, I also get ticked off when we hire someone new with little experience and they want to redo everything from the ground up in whatever the trendy language / framework / style of the day is, even after we explain why things are the way they are)
and to be specific as the 'it' at the end could be misunderstood.. the great reasons were why it's a good to release the research, not why it's a good idea to keep it locked up (most of those arguments were a joke)
If the dinosaurs of the publishing industry don't change (which they're really reluctant to do while claiming that their business models give them the ability to 'innovate' (see the AGU response), they'll go belly up, and risk leaving us with a gap in the scientific record.
(and I'm harsher on AGU than some of the others because they're a society that should be about distribution of knowledge, and as a member, they never asked us what our opinions were before sending the response)
I have a record of speaking out against closed journals (although, maybe not on here), and I've stirred the pot up on a couple of mailing lists.
But there's one problem that people need to remember -- Elsevier and these others hold the copyright to large amounts of reference materials. If we cut them off entirely, and they don't change quickly enough, then they go backrupt... and someone needs to be able to buy up that material so that it can be served to the public.
Yes, we need to open things up going forward -- but we don't want to create a mini-dark age at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
And we saw how well that worked in Hot Fuzz:
Agreed on the datbases ... although I've heard some interesting ideas w/ using database disks for backups of other systems.
Basically, you spread your database across the inner 10% of the disks ... then use the other 90% for your backups of other systems. When the databases aren't at peak, you run the backups.
This way, you spread the database across 10x the number of spindles.
You could probably back up the database itself to the disks, but you'll want some logic to make sure there's more than one disk group, so you don't back up a given partition back to the same disk.
The problem is that modern use has deviated from the original meaning of the word (which meant to reduce by 1/10th ... not *to* one tenth, but *by* 1/10th ... it was a punishment in to the Roman Army in which one of every 10 soldiers was killed)
Modern usage would have you think that it means to reduce to near nothing, rather than simply losing 10%.
Yes, their estimate of wages is likely high ... however, what they didn't include:
In the US, the 'burdened cost' for an employee is about twice what their wages are. It's possible that if you were to outsouce, the multiplier would go up (cost of the computers haven't decreased; and the costs of running that much bandwidth to a place that won't have the same infrastructure)
So yes, the analysis is absurd, but I'm guessing it's closer than most people would think. (if they're getting paid US$15k/year, it might be closer to US$45k burdened cost, so ~ 1/4 the cost, not ~1/12 the cost)
As best that I can tell for the 'safe search' filters for the images -- they guess based on how much flesh tones are in the images.
So if you paint all of your actors and actresses blue and make avatar porn, it might not get caught automatically. (of course, someone might still report it, and get it taken down)
I assume that he'd use something that's already been tested, like LiquidFeedback, which was developed by members of German Pirate Party. ... or any of the other ones in the list of active or related projects listed at metagovernment.org
Or, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman were right, and it's just a sign that God has a sense of humor:
The whole first chapter* of Good Omens is on the Harper Collins website: http://www.harpercollins.com/features/pratchettBooks/excerpt.aspx?isbn=9780060853969
* I *think* that it's the intro + first chapter, as I believe the first chapter started 'It wasn't a dark and stormy night.'
I'm currently working on a government contract, and the prime contractor is a 'small, minority owned' business. Before that, the prime was a 'small, minority woman owned' business.
I don't think the current one is 'woman owned', but the one before was the president's wife held 51% of the company. (and they got rather litigious when they lost on the re-compete)
But here's the thing -- set asides mean that you're competing in a completely different contest. What I'd much prefer seeing is for them to treat it more like giving a few points to the other side.
I don't know how much it's really worth to them, but they could come up with some sort of a preference system. For example, if we had:
Locally owned: 2%
Woman owned: 1%
Minority owned: 1%
Veteran owned: 1%
Small business: 1%
Then a local, minority woman owned small business would be compared at 5% lower than their bid amount to someone who didn't meet any of those. Of course, I think the rules for 'small business' needs to be tightned up (SBA's definition is *huge*), and I wouldn't mind seeing it being a scale. (you're 51% woman owned? then you qualify for a 0.51% (51% of 1%) advantage)
My former boss's wife was working on her psych major -- she explained everyone in her class was basically trying to figure out what was wrong with them.
And that's not to say that Heather didn't have quirks, either -- she had an obsession for buying stuff at auctions ... especially jewlery and shiny things ... but she never wore jewelry ... and then she found eBay, and it was all downhill from there. (this was the late 1990s)
I've been on grant review boards -- a large number of the grants submitted make an assumption that they'll publish a paper a year, and include the 'page fees' (or whatever is appropriate in their field) in their grant proposal to cover the publishing of the research information.
Now, conversely, I really liked Jason Priem and Bradley M. Hemminger's recent article, 'Decoupling the Scholarly Journal', which talks about the basic tasks that a journal does, and how they don't all need to be done by a single entity. (I admit, I've only scanned it, I need to go back and read it more thoroughly, so hopefully I haven't misrepresented it)
The problem with your assumption that journals are covered by subscription fees is that the rates for library subscriptions has been rising so significantly that many are rebelling, and just dropping the subscriptions entirely. Some have designated the savings to go into a pool to pay author fees, but I'm also personally against the current model of author-pays-on-acceptance. (as it means they're subsidizing all of the rejections; it's been pointed out that journals pride themselves on exclusivity ("we only accept 2%"), so are unlikely to establish fees on submission as it may pre-filter the rejections)
The transit of venus will be visible from most of North America (assuming no weather issues):
Unfortunately, the NASA eclipse website's taking a hammering today, but this should be the map (try the link tomorrow)
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/tran/TOV2012-Fig01.pdf
And there's an official gathering near you, too:
http://venustransit.gsfc.nasa.gov/events/viewapprovedevent/id/212
For the transit times & path from your area, see:
http://transitofvenus.nl/wp/where-when/local-transit-times/
My company's password policy is that you're not allowed to use password vault software.
I wish I were kidding.
Oddly, though, the new policy came out a month or two after the xkcd comic, and they *did* make a special exemption for using dictionary words and the other password complexity rules provided the password was of sufficient length.
And I think most of the systems will lock out after between 3-5 failed attempts, but they'll automatically unlock after 5-15 minutes, so you don't have to call in.
Hybrids are going to have an advantage in stop-and-go traffic, due to the regenerative braking and lower speeds.
The TDI is going to have an advantage in long distance driving, even with the same engine, as it doesn't have the weight of two power systems.
So, if you're going to be doing 90% of your traffic as highway traffic, and you time your trips to avoid congestion, the hybrid will *never* be as efficient as a lighter small engine car.
(I don't own a hybrid, but I was on the GW Solar Car Team, when it placed first in the 1996 World Solar-Car Rallye ... and yes, we were in the 'junior' class, but came out ahead of all vehicles in the higher classes)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/08/1716235/sacrificing-accuracy-for-speed-and-efficiency-in-processors
Of course, you might've been sacrificing speed for accuracy in that 3 year estimate.
(and for all of the nay sayers -- I could see this being great for monte carlo simulations or other modeling where you're dealing with so much imprecise inputs that minor error's not going to be significant)
When I had my house converted to circuit breakers, it was less than $100 for them to add the whole-house surge, but the electrician was already there for the panel replacement. The whole job was only $700, but that was a good decade or so ago.
It just slots into two of the circuit breaker spaces, so I'm assuming it's just open the panel cover and swap 'em out should something go wrong. (mind you, he also drove in a couple of new grounding rods outside, and connected it all up, so the installation was a little more than just slotting them in)
Whole house brownouts on the other hand ... that's something I've still got issues with, but I'm not willing to put up the money for a giant flywheel.
The centering bits are a problem, but for the others -- use a CSS pre-processor. (Sass, LESS, Scaffold, Compass, Stylus,etc.)
There are ones that are more Ruby-ish, or Python-ish, etc. Some can calculate colors (darken, lighten, blend, etc.), but almost all let you set things to variables so they can be set in one place and used multiple times.
(and none of this is really new -- I know folks that were using ColdFusion, PHP or even Perl to generate their CSS a good decade or so ago ... it's a page of text, and pretty much anything that can generate an HTML page can generate CSS too)
I do a fair bit of work in IDL (writing software for the scientists to use) ... but there are days that I want to stab myself repeatedly with a fork. (I've asked for ages for native SOAP/WSDL support ... they insist they have it, because they can do the OGC services ... but those aren't the SOAP calls I'm trying to make)
If you don't interact with their XML *just* right, it can cause some horrible problems where the cleanup time increases exponentially with the number of elements. And try to do it all with regex? Well, their regex parser is a joke, too.
They *finally* introduced a concept of lists (and empty lists!), associative arrays, and null in IDL8 ... but I've got to support IDL7, too. (and of course, IDL8 save files aren't backwards compatable with IDL7, so that caused all sorts of problems, too).
And if they weren't so litigious, I could've used PDL to extract what I need from the save files, but that boat's sailed ... and I haven't gotten enough time to learn enough Python to redo those cron jobs using IDLSave.
(and yes, there's still quite a bit of Fortran ... and C, GDL, PDL, Matlab, SciPy, etc ... but not a single damned person that I know of using Ruby for science in our group)
How much did they pay on the Google Books settlement? Oh, wait, that wasn't 'breaking the law', as there wasn't a court involved ... so let's go with:
And how many do you need? Only one to disprove your claim that there aren't any. To claim 'tons of' ... more than that. (and in that case, showing where they won doesn't show that there aren't any that they lost)
(and look, I'm supportive of some of the stuff Google does ... but your selective listing is insinuating that they've never done illegal stuff, which was the original claim ... and doing illegal stuff, and being found guilty by the courts are two different things, as everyone tries to settle out of court to avoid setting a legal precident)
In general, the 'we're going to the Moon, and then to Mars' was the start of it ... Added the stuff that NASA had to do, but no money to pay for it, so other departments got canibalized.
There was a lot of press about the folks in Florida who lost their jobs after the last shuttle lanuch ... but nothing about the people who were let go years before because their discipline had cuts so that the shuttle could continue going up past its planned life without any funding to pay for it.
And for JWST, there was a bit of a flap back in September ... search for 'james webb space telescope controversy' in your preferred search engine.
then you put in an ILL (Inter-Library Loan) request ... but typically, most libraries have a budget for getting requested books, and if they think the book will be of general interest (and c'mon, it's an award winning children's book), they'll just go and buy a copy.
And if you're really set on comic books, ask if the children's librarian can make a recommendation. Even a small library (6-8 librarians) will typically have a dedicated children's librarian. (or just look through the 'E' section, and you'll find lots of good stuff)
When you look at the apprentice / journeyman / master system, you're supposed to get broader experience in the journeyman phase ... you go place to place, learning from other experts.
When you've got the team lead who's been trained internally and has known nothing other than working at that one place, I see that as a red flag. If you ask them why they're doing something a specific way, and they give an answer that's effectively 'because that's the way we've always done it', it's a sign that they're not going to be receptive to new ideas.
(and yet, at the same time, I also get ticked off when we hire someone new with little experience and they want to redo everything from the ground up in whatever the trendy language / framework / style of the day is, even after we explain why things are the way they are)
The two within the 'pairs' are 8 years apart, but the full pattern is:
8 - 105.5 - 8 - 121.5 - (repeat)
Here's how each representative voted (or not):
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/112-2012/h192
But does anyone know where to find the details about what each of the various amendments was? ('amendment 10' isn't really all that useful)
and to be specific as the 'it' at the end could be misunderstood .. the great reasons were why it's a good to release the research, not why it's a good idea to keep it locked up (most of those arguments were a joke)
If the dinosaurs of the publishing industry don't change (which they're really reluctant to do while claiming that their business models give them the ability to 'innovate' (see the AGU response), they'll go belly up, and risk leaving us with a gap in the scientific record.
(and I'm harsher on AGU than some of the others because they're a society that should be about distribution of knowledge, and as a member, they never asked us what our opinions were before sending the response)
I have a record of speaking out against closed journals (although, maybe not on here), and I've stirred the pot up on a couple of mailing lists.
But there's one problem that people need to remember -- Elsevier and these others hold the copyright to large amounts of reference materials. If we cut them off entirely, and they don't change quickly enough, then they go backrupt ... and someone needs to be able to buy up that material so that it can be served to the public.
Yes, we need to open things up going forward -- but we don't want to create a mini-dark age at the same time.
(and if you want to read lots of the publisher's claims at why they need to keep things locked up, which is mostly 'because that's our business model', see http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/30/your-comments-access-federally-funded-scientific-research-results . And there's lots of great reasons from other people and groups about why it's such a dumb idea.)