Who wants to bet, that this batch of concrete had some orange Fiestaware mix into it, or perhaps just a natural concentration of pitchblende, and it has nothing to do with Fukushima?
All the consumer hard drive retailers (e.g. Newegg, microcenter, anywhere) hiked hard drive prices by 200-400% months ago as a response to the floods.
I know the big name storage vendors spend less on spinning media and more on, well, overhead and profits, but they come out looking like good guys if they only hiked their prices 5 to 15 percent.
The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.
And the information will remain highly secure - right up until someone takes a non-secure camera and points it at the secure smartphone so they can get their job done.
1st Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: It always costs more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Hofstadter's original law actually only applies to time (not money). Typical usage: A couple years ago the NYC MTA Canarsie line "next train" countdown signs, originally a two year project, were running a couple years behind, and projected to take 5 years to complete.
It used to be "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.".
The moral for today in my industry (semigovernmental in CIO strategy) is all about corporate brand names. i.e. if there is no corporate big brand name attached it has no chance. If there is a corporate big brand name then by definition it's OK and let into the starting gate.
IBM is still in the arena but there's a bunch other names at least in the US: Oracle, Microsoft, Computer Associates, (don't get me started on CA and their bleed-the-customer-dry strategy) or any of the major government/defense contractors.
I've been fiendish a couple of times since Oracle bought MySQL, and the only way I got MySQL into the solution (and the solution did not need any fancy pants database features!) was by arguing that since Oracle owns it, it'll be OK to do it that way.
Geeze... going back in time... a 1.5 Mbit T1 connection, while actually a continuous 1.5 Mbit connection, never quite delivered that much speed when it was hooked to "the internet" and expected to move TCP/IP traffic. Same for 10 Mbit Ethernet (and that was never a true bidirectional 10 Mbits to begin with).
Protocol overhead always nibbles away at the edges.
The Americurium-241 (about 1 microgram) in a smoke detector is pretty securely packaged up inside a little disc inside a housing that strongly encourages you to not throw it away in the normal trash but instead treat it as recycleable hazardous waste. It's an alpha emitter and the little plastic disc and housing very thoroughly stops the alpha particles from getting out and getting to your skin.
That said, pulling the disc out and trying to get the Americurium out is pretty stupid and although the 1 microgram is perfectly safe in its little disc housing (probably even if you swallowed it), removing/scraping the Americurium and getting it under your skin or in your digestive system or lungs would be a bad idea. Conceivably it could mess up family or neighbors. Ingesting, inhaled, or absorbed in blood alpha emitters (even accidentally) is a bad idea.
I'm 99% sure that if he was charged with anything, it would be not properly storing or disposing of hazardous waste.
I tend to keep my linux development machines on the bleeding edge of the distro and there is rarely a problem.
To be fair I doubt that any distro would put Java 7 in its bleeding edge. The bleeding edge of any distro has some kind of QC process already.
In his original complaint http://www.spamsuite.com/webfm_send/357 the guy running E360 presented as fact, that Spamhaus had blocked at least 27,345,357 unique messages from E360.
This is like saying, oh, I killed 37 people (and here's a list of who I killed) and that's why the cops are ganging up on me so I'm suing them.
The Mongolian cluster-fuck that the Intel-HP-Oracle triangle centered around Itanium has become, was spotted way way before any of their management drank the Kool-Aid. (And oh man, they were guzzling the Itanium Kool-Aid by the gallon). Google "Itanic".
The future could see credit cards contain as much processing power as your current smartphone.
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. -- Robert X. Cringley
I don't see what the problem with the new laws is. They make it somewhere between uneconomical and impossible for companies to archive personal data (about me and you and others) forever without a well-defined use. What's the big deal?
For a long time there's been the hope in every company, that if they archive every piece of personal data, including every search term I've ever used and every cookie ever in my browser and everything I've ever bought at the grocery store or drugstore while using a credit card or loyalty card, that somehow this would pay off to them monetarily. They've already been paying money and effort to store this data probably without any obvious benefit to them. If these new regulations drive home the point that there's no point in storing all that useless information because of regulatory costs, what they'll do is simply stop storing it. No problem. Their IT suddenly becomes much more efficient because they are doing useless storage and archiving. They'll probably get a higher profit margin as a result.
It's kind of scary. At many big non-IT companies, IT costs have risen to as much as 6% to 10% of their cost of doing business. This is simply unsustainable. As IT technologies improve, IT should become a cheaper and smaller part of every company. Not get more and more expensive.
If I wanted to distribute hidden terrorist messages broadly around the world, leveraging willing dupes who would use their PC's to host the filesharing/torrents, for sure I would embed it in porn using steganography. It's really the obvious choice.
They also focus more on using energy efficiently than on sourcing it cleanly.
Well, yeah. Using energy efficiently saves them money. Sourcing it cleanly can cost them money.
At least there is a lot of effort for flops/watt or even better apps/watt (also including HVAC capacity and daily costs) lately. That's such a huge win over 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Yeah, but this is CMU. They are not aiming to turn out code grunts. I don't deny that some will become code grunts but that shouldn't be their purpose.
Imagine, say, that freshman mechanical engineering students were being given a course on sheet metal fabrication. IMHO that's a very good analogy to teaching freshman CS students about OO programming. Top-flight mechanical engineering academic programs will have a way of introducing the limits of sheet metal fabrication to it's mechanical engineering students in a broader context. Similarly a top flight computer science program will introduce the limits of OO programming to its students in a broader context.
At my "day job" I occasionally have to respond to congressional inquiries.
Internally we have many checks and balances on data, computer records, personally identifiable information, etc.
All of those checks and balances are sumarrily bypassed when it's a congressional inquiry. Often I see all the crap checks and balances being bypassed as cutting through unnecessary red tape and have to have some respect for the ability of a congressman to bypass all that crap.
Usually in response to such an inquiry I take the attitude of "shoot them all and let god sort them out". i.e. if it's a computer database we turn over literally hundreds of thousands of pages of data. The requests are in fact fishing expeditions almost all the time so it's hard to respond otherwise.
Focusing on the basics, and not on the tools of the trade, is very important at something that is not a "trade school", and CMU's computer science department certainly lives above the trade school level. (Just to contrast: when I was a freshman, the "trade school" argument was whether new students should be taught Fortran or Pascal ! Thank heaven I didn't devote my career to being a programmer.)
It seems to me that CMU's made the very obvious decision that today, OO is a tool for craftsmen, not for freshman computer scientists. And they probably are right. It's important to not confuse the tools of the trade, with the basics of the science, and this is especially true at the freshman level. For a good while (going back decades) OO was enough on the leading edge that its very existence was an academic and research subject but that hardly seems necessary today.
In the electrical engineering realm, the analogy is deciding that they're gonna teach electronics to freshmen, and not teach them whatever the latest-and-greatest-VLSI-design-software tool is. And that's a fine decision too. I saw a lot of formerly good EE programs in the 80's and 90's become totally dominated and trashed by whatever the latest VLSI toolset was.
Right now circa 10% of the economy GDP is being wasted on IT.
See e.g. IT expenditures as a fraction of GDP.
Imagine if someone else came up with a "new refrigerator" and the efforts on maintaining the "new refrigerator" came to suck up 10% of the economy.
There would be a "slashdot for refrigerators" and a bunch of nerds would be lamenting how they are actually helping the econmy by sucking up 10% of it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've got a Geiger counter, orange Fiestaware is the cat's meow.
1.6 mSv is 0.00162 mrem.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/consumer%20products/fiesta.htm Estimates for consumer exposure to the uranium in the glazing of orange Fiestaware show you could rack up to a mSv in just a few hours exposure.
Who wants to bet, that this batch of concrete had some orange Fiestaware mix into it, or perhaps just a natural concentration of pitchblende, and it has nothing to do with Fukushima?
All the consumer hard drive retailers (e.g. Newegg, microcenter, anywhere) hiked hard drive prices by 200-400% months ago as a response to the floods. I know the big name storage vendors spend less on spinning media and more on, well, overhead and profits, but they come out looking like good guys if they only hiked their prices 5 to 15 percent.
And that's why you don't use a one-armed man to scare someone.
A guy being treated for a decade for pancreatic cancer, certainly has more need for a handicapped spot than 90% of the folks I see using them.
The first internet-age era step was (at least in physics publishing) 20 years ago: the LANL Preprint Archive, later known as xxx.lanl.gov, now www.arxiv.org
Previous to that there were paper preprints mailed out for decades and decades.
Now other fields have indeed have a harder time getting out from under the thumb of the publishing houses and will indeed need the kick in the rear that Princeton is giving.
That doesn't mean that refereed journals are going away - just that they are not the bleeding edge anymore, I would argue they never were.
And the information will remain highly secure - right up until someone takes a non-secure camera and points it at the secure smartphone so they can get their job done.
1st Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: It always costs more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Hofstadter's original law actually only applies to time (not money). Typical usage: A couple years ago the NYC MTA Canarsie line "next train" countdown signs, originally a two year project, were running a couple years behind, and projected to take 5 years to complete.
It used to be "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.".
The moral for today in my industry (semigovernmental in CIO strategy) is all about corporate brand names. i.e. if there is no corporate big brand name attached it has no chance. If there is a corporate big brand name then by definition it's OK and let into the starting gate.
IBM is still in the arena but there's a bunch other names at least in the US: Oracle, Microsoft, Computer Associates, (don't get me started on CA and their bleed-the-customer-dry strategy) or any of the major government/defense contractors.
I've been fiendish a couple of times since Oracle bought MySQL, and the only way I got MySQL into the solution (and the solution did not need any fancy pants database features!) was by arguing that since Oracle owns it, it'll be OK to do it that way.
Took me a while to decode the original article because it manages to wander all over the place.
Synopsis: The Scunthorpe Problem all over again
Geeze... going back in time... a 1.5 Mbit T1 connection, while actually a continuous 1.5 Mbit connection, never quite delivered that much speed when it was hooked to "the internet" and expected to move TCP/IP traffic. Same for 10 Mbit Ethernet (and that was never a true bidirectional 10 Mbits to begin with).
Protocol overhead always nibbles away at the edges.
The Americurium-241 (about 1 microgram) in a smoke detector is pretty securely packaged up inside a little disc inside a housing that strongly encourages you to not throw it away in the normal trash but instead treat it as recycleable hazardous waste. It's an alpha emitter and the little plastic disc and housing very thoroughly stops the alpha particles from getting out and getting to your skin. That said, pulling the disc out and trying to get the Americurium out is pretty stupid and although the 1 microgram is perfectly safe in its little disc housing (probably even if you swallowed it), removing/scraping the Americurium and getting it under your skin or in your digestive system or lungs would be a bad idea. Conceivably it could mess up family or neighbors. Ingesting, inhaled, or absorbed in blood alpha emitters (even accidentally) is a bad idea. I'm 99% sure that if he was charged with anything, it would be not properly storing or disposing of hazardous waste.
I tend to keep my linux development machines on the bleeding edge of the distro and there is rarely a problem. To be fair I doubt that any distro would put Java 7 in its bleeding edge. The bleeding edge of any distro has some kind of QC process already.
In his original complaint http://www.spamsuite.com/webfm_send/357 the guy running E360 presented as fact, that Spamhaus had blocked at least 27,345,357 unique messages from E360.
This is like saying, oh, I killed 37 people (and here's a list of who I killed) and that's why the cops are ganging up on me so I'm suing them.
The Mongolian cluster-fuck that the Intel-HP-Oracle triangle centered around Itanium has become, was spotted way way before any of their management drank the Kool-Aid. (And oh man, they were guzzling the Itanium Kool-Aid by the gallon). Google "Itanic".
If linux kernels had microsoft marketing setting the names, we wouldn't have decimal points etc.
It would be "Linux NT", "Linux 95", "Linux Server 2003", "Linux XP", "Linux Vista", "Linux 7".
Just think how much more marketable Linux could be and how much more the suits would want to buy it.
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. -- Robert X. Cringley
Wow, I thought Gnome and KDE etc. were X11 Window Managers.
I go look at how people talk about them, and they seem to be lifestyle choices now.
I don't see what the problem with the new laws is. They make it somewhere between uneconomical and impossible for companies to archive personal data (about me and you and others) forever without a well-defined use. What's the big deal?
For a long time there's been the hope in every company, that if they archive every piece of personal data, including every search term I've ever used and every cookie ever in my browser and everything I've ever bought at the grocery store or drugstore while using a credit card or loyalty card, that somehow this would pay off to them monetarily. They've already been paying money and effort to store this data probably without any obvious benefit to them. If these new regulations drive home the point that there's no point in storing all that useless information because of regulatory costs, what they'll do is simply stop storing it. No problem. Their IT suddenly becomes much more efficient because they are doing useless storage and archiving. They'll probably get a higher profit margin as a result.
It's kind of scary. At many big non-IT companies, IT costs have risen to as much as 6% to 10% of their cost of doing business. This is simply unsustainable. As IT technologies improve, IT should become a cheaper and smaller part of every company. Not get more and more expensive.
If I wanted to distribute hidden terrorist messages broadly around the world, leveraging willing dupes who would use their PC's to host the filesharing/torrents, for sure I would embed it in porn using steganography. It's really the obvious choice.
So slashdot is about, oh, 33 years late :-).
Well, yeah. Using energy efficiently saves them money. Sourcing it cleanly can cost them money.
At least there is a lot of effort for flops/watt or even better apps/watt (also including HVAC capacity and daily costs) lately. That's such a huge win over 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Yeah, but this is CMU. They are not aiming to turn out code grunts. I don't deny that some will become code grunts but that shouldn't be their purpose.
Imagine, say, that freshman mechanical engineering students were being given a course on sheet metal fabrication. IMHO that's a very good analogy to teaching freshman CS students about OO programming. Top-flight mechanical engineering academic programs will have a way of introducing the limits of sheet metal fabrication to it's mechanical engineering students in a broader context. Similarly a top flight computer science program will introduce the limits of OO programming to its students in a broader context.
At my "day job" I occasionally have to respond to congressional inquiries.
Internally we have many checks and balances on data, computer records, personally identifiable information, etc.
All of those checks and balances are sumarrily bypassed when it's a congressional inquiry. Often I see all the crap checks and balances being bypassed as cutting through unnecessary red tape and have to have some respect for the ability of a congressman to bypass all that crap.
Usually in response to such an inquiry I take the attitude of "shoot them all and let god sort them out". i.e. if it's a computer database we turn over literally hundreds of thousands of pages of data. The requests are in fact fishing expeditions almost all the time so it's hard to respond otherwise.
Focusing on the basics, and not on the tools of the trade, is very important at something that is not a "trade school", and CMU's computer science department certainly lives above the trade school level. (Just to contrast: when I was a freshman, the "trade school" argument was whether new students should be taught Fortran or Pascal ! Thank heaven I didn't devote my career to being a programmer.)
It seems to me that CMU's made the very obvious decision that today, OO is a tool for craftsmen, not for freshman computer scientists. And they probably are right. It's important to not confuse the tools of the trade, with the basics of the science, and this is especially true at the freshman level. For a good while (going back decades) OO was enough on the leading edge that its very existence was an academic and research subject but that hardly seems necessary today.
In the electrical engineering realm, the analogy is deciding that they're gonna teach electronics to freshmen, and not teach them whatever the latest-and-greatest-VLSI-design-software tool is. And that's a fine decision too. I saw a lot of formerly good EE programs in the 80's and 90's become totally dominated and trashed by whatever the latest VLSI toolset was.
Right now circa 10% of the economy GDP is being wasted on IT.
See e.g. IT expenditures as a fraction of GDP.
Imagine if someone else came up with a "new refrigerator" and the efforts on maintaining the "new refrigerator" came to suck up 10% of the economy.
There would be a "slashdot for refrigerators" and a bunch of nerds would be lamenting how they are actually helping the econmy by sucking up 10% of it.