My understanding was that the switch to corn syrup was not specifically because it was cheaper (although it probably was that too), but because corn syrup prices were much more stable. International sugar prices tended to shift all the time, which burns accountants like elven rope. Stable prices == more predictable expenses.
Again with the sexual innuendo about the near-frictionless lubricant.
Come on, people, think about this some, do you *really* want near-frictionless lubricant for sex? You can already simulate that now. Just drop your pants and wave your dick in the air.
As for the rest of the article, laughable. The next step in innovation is *quieter fans*??? Why not just *cooler CPUs*?
There's obviously a lot of evangelism going on here, I can't even get involved in discussions of using old PCs as firewalls to protect valuable network resources, other than to say I've worked for many corporations over the years and I haven't yet worked for one that ran a production network using old PCs as routers and firewalls.
Anyway, if one is asking what *I* use, at home it's the perfectly usable firewall capabilities built-in to my network router, plus I still run BlackIce on my systems. (Yes, I know, BlackIce is far from perfect, and it annoys me sometimes, but it does what a lot of other commercial software firewalls don't do, it *tells me* when it sees questionable activity.)
For work, if I really didn't trust my LAN, I'd probably do something similar, hardware router acting as a firewall protecting my systems collectively, with additional software firewalls on my critical servers for a little overkill. The one Microsoft offers now would probably be sufficient, and at least won't dent the $100 budget mentioned.
A good quality anti-virus software should always be running on any windows server too, of course. One configured to get updated a/v definitions at least once a day.
Really, how often is it the liberals who side with State's Rights?
Because that's all this decision really is. The Supreme Court didn't say that it's good if states or municipalities sieze property to build a strip mall.
What the ruling says is, that the definition of "public good" does not belong to the federal courts. Stevens wrote "local officials are better positioned than federal judges to decide what's best for a community".
How can I argue with that? If I have to wonder who chooses what is best for my community, I sure as hell want that decision in the hands of someon *I* vote for. Not someone appointed by some president thousands of miles away who doesn't know a damn thing about my community.
Is this specific case a good use of eminent domain? I don't think so. But I don't live there and I didn't vote in the local elections that elected the people who did make the decision.
The constitution clearly gives the govermnents, federal, state, and local, the right to sieze property through eminent domain for "the public good". All I see hear is that the supreme court rightly left that decision at the local level.
If the people living in the community don't like this, they have all the power in the world to change the people who made the decision.
I guess maybe more people should have been voting in local elections all along.
Nightcrawler's teleportation isn't instant, he's travelling through an intervening dimension. He doesn't pass through points A and B in the "Real" world, but there is a non-zero time between disappearing at A and appearing at B.
This was very obvious in the movie, of course, but even in the comics you can usually see that there's a slight lag.
Ha, just the opposite, the studios have the theater owners by the balls. Studios get the vast majority of ticket sales during a film's initial opening weeks, theaters only start getting their cut later on, when 99% of showings have mostly empty theaters.
As much as they gouge you for ticket sales, food, and ads, most theaters *barely* squeak by, especially if they're not a massive chain. Every place I've lived in the last few years has seen dozens of formerly small independent theaters shut down because they just couldn't make money.
No surprise that there's talk of "gourmet" food for astronauts. The Navy has long had a tradition of assigning the best chefs to submarines, with the thought that if you're trapped in a tin can for several months, at least if the food is good it will help morale a little.
Now make that tin can even smaller and send it out into space, I can see where astronauts would be craving some fine food after a few months.
I *guarantee* there are more jedi out there post-Sith than Yoda and Obi-Wan. First, it's somewhat foreshadowed by Obi-Wan changing the "Distress signal" to alert other jedis to stay away.
Second, and much more important, Lucas is commiting to a tv series and a clone wars cartoon that both do not feature major characters from the movies, and that take place between episodes 3 and 4.
Conclusion: No way in hell are they making either of those shows without jedis in them. Therefore, there are other jedis, dark and light, still scattered around the galaxy.
I actually know of a case of a scientist smuggling genetically-modified mice into the country in his pants, to get around obstacles to a) getting the mice *out* of the source lab and b) getting them *in* to his lab.
Pretty much the whole incident got a shake-of-the-head then a wink-and-a-nod from the scientist's peers and superiors.
It's no surprise to me that unethical behaviour often gets a blind eye in academic circles. After all, same thing happens in corporate circles. And in Political Circles.
"Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market."
Uh, what market is that? File serving? EMC, Network Appliance, SNAP, and others might challenge that. Maybe I really just don't understand what "market" is being referred to here.
In my experience, 9 times out of 10 when a game has horrible crappy voice acting, it's because they specifically did *not* hire professional voice actors, but instead got developers or friends or random people on the street to do it.
Does no one else remember the horrifying voice of Richard Garriot as Lord British in Ultima VII?
UF used to be funny enough, but I lost interest in it long ago when I realized I hadn't laughed at it for months. I've been a sysadmin for 10+ years so I find the setting humorous enough, but stopped finding the jokes funny a long time ago. Every time I check back from time to time it still just doesn't do anything for me. Of course, I also stopped reading Dilbert as well. It just felt like I reached a point where I had apparently seen all the author's available jokes and was just seeing them recycled in various ways over and over.
Oh, the windows user is stoopid, and the tech support guy has to take calls from stoopid lusers! Ho ho ho! How droll!
This study is highly suspect. The total population was I believe only about 3,000, which is not huge, and specifically in the UK, which is a fairly small region, how does one control for cultural pressures?
For example, the engineering professions have a higher concentration of Indians and Asian, both cultures that sometimes have a strong preference against girls, even to the point of infanticide in some extreme cases.
What if the apparent genetic selection against females is really the result of some incidents of selective abortion?
If the author's point was that a lot more intersexed children are being born than we think, this study might have some interesting conclusions, but since that is not actually mentioned in the blurbs I've read (exclusions by the media are certainly possible) one has to assume they literally mean more genetically male children are being born to certain parents. The mechanism for this if true would be fairly fascinating, since males produce X and Y sperm in equal amounts, and there has not been any documented mechanism by which a given egg would give preferential selection to a particular X or Y sperm.
Almost certainly it was a corporate policy. My own company has had the lawyers pushing for a couple years no to have mandatory email deletion after only a few weeks, and the previous company did the same. Literally, no exceptions, they were going to force IT to auto-delete anything based on age, and the policy was going to be that if people needed to keep an email they should print it out and file it.
That pressure from the lawyers stopped not too long ago. I guess we have SOX to thank for that.
Needing to call someone to rent out hardware to respond to peak load is not going to be conducive to uptime during unexpected peak loads.
Do you really want your ecommerce site, the lifeblood of your revenue, going down even for a couple hours because it got linked to from slashdot? I don't.
Every time I find some website or service not working because it's "too busy" I grumble about businesses not speccing their systems for a reasonable peak load. (Blizzard, I'm looking in your direction.)
As for why not put a billion services all on one big box, I'm not completely opposed to the idea, but one thing I would be concerned about is single point of failure. Having 1,000 small systems instead of one 1,000 cpu system means that one system being down means that most of the services I provide are still up.
The level of cost and resources required to really hit that 99.999% uptime number, especially if you don't cheat and not count routine maintenance, is HUGE.
My years of experience increasingly make me feel that, failure happens. No matter how expensive your infrastructure, or how much redundancy you have, at some point something somewhere fails. I prefer, as much as possible to limit the ability of any one failure to affect other services.
Heck, Google is a great example of why a bajillion small web servers can be a lot better than one or two big ones. Last I read they expect a failure rate of something like 1 web server/day, but they can replace them quickly and easily without anyone noticing a service interruption.
I'm not opposed to service consolidation when it makes sense, but I'm not sure I agree with this growing trend some IT managers follow of putting all their eggs in one basket.
I don't know about *useless* unless one is going to argue that movie ticket prices have come down since 1996.
Simply adjusting for inflation alone also doesn't necessarily give useful numbers. There are a *lot* more movie screens available now than there were in the 1950s, for example.
Now let's see a list based on average number of tickets sold/screen!
It's not that complicated. Disk image backups and file-level backups are not intended to serve the same purpose.
Disk image backups are pure disaster recovery or deployment. Something is down and needs to be back up ASAP, where even the few minutes of recreating partitions and MBRs is unwanted. Or it's about deploying dozens or hundreds of client systems as quickly as possible with as few staff as possible.
File level backups are insurance for users. Someone deletes/edits/breaks something important and needs it back or an old version back, etc.
Sometimes, separating those two business needs (DR from user restoration) is the most sensible thing to do.
If it's anything like KotOR 1 or 2, double the single campaign playing time. After all, you *are* going to play through it as both Open Palm and Closed Fist, aren't you?
I have to agree, it looks like there's some great stuff in Tiger, but I just can't seem to care about file searching. I've been accumulating files and data for well over 20 years now, and I never find myself looking for files I can't find.
I guess this is a great boon for the disorganized though.
I, personally, think the Dashboard and Automator stuff is much more interesting than Spotlight, but Spotlight seems to get all the attention.
You know, every plant that we grow has been "genetically-modified".
Every plant or animal that the human race has domesticated is genetically modified. We just used to modify the genes through selective breeding and hybridization, etc. Now we can do it in labs.
I guess when Farmers did it, it was safe and natural, but when a guy in a white coat does it, he's sinning aggainst nature?
Personal attacks against the author rather than any attempt to dispute actual points....yup...that looks like a Wikipedian response if ever I read one. And one wonders why people, especially experts, would be "scared" to contribute?
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding was that the switch to corn syrup was not specifically because it was cheaper (although it probably was that too), but because corn syrup prices were much more stable. International sugar prices tended to shift all the time, which burns accountants like elven rope. Stable prices == more predictable expenses.
Again with the sexual innuendo about the near-frictionless lubricant.
Come on, people, think about this some, do you *really* want near-frictionless lubricant for sex? You can already simulate that now. Just drop your pants and wave your dick in the air.
As for the rest of the article, laughable. The next step in innovation is *quieter fans*??? Why not just *cooler CPUs*?
Or we're people who go out a lot on other nights of the week.
Or we have Tivo.
The Watchmen movie has been suspended, actually.
m l?
http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/622/622941p1.ht
Ack, that Application Protection system is probably one of BlackIce's most annoying features, I always turn that off!
Thanks for the reminder.
There's obviously a lot of evangelism going on here, I can't even get involved in discussions of using old PCs as firewalls to protect valuable network resources, other than to say I've worked for many corporations over the years and I haven't yet worked for one that ran a production network using old PCs as routers and firewalls.
Anyway, if one is asking what *I* use, at home it's the perfectly usable firewall capabilities built-in to my network router, plus I still run BlackIce on my systems. (Yes, I know, BlackIce is far from perfect, and it annoys me sometimes, but it does what a lot of other commercial software firewalls don't do, it *tells me* when it sees questionable activity.)
For work, if I really didn't trust my LAN, I'd probably do something similar, hardware router acting as a firewall protecting my systems collectively, with additional software firewalls on my critical servers for a little overkill. The one Microsoft offers now would probably be sufficient, and at least won't dent the $100 budget mentioned.
A good quality anti-virus software should always be running on any windows server too, of course. One configured to get updated a/v definitions at least once a day.
Really, how often is it the liberals who side with State's Rights?
Because that's all this decision really is. The Supreme Court didn't say that it's good if states or municipalities sieze property to build a strip mall.
What the ruling says is, that the definition of "public good" does not belong to the federal courts. Stevens wrote "local officials are better positioned than federal judges to decide what's best for a community".
How can I argue with that? If I have to wonder who chooses what is best for my community, I sure as hell want that decision in the hands of someon *I* vote for. Not someone appointed by some president thousands of miles away who doesn't know a damn thing about my community.
Is this specific case a good use of eminent domain? I don't think so. But I don't live there and I didn't vote in the local elections that elected the people who did make the decision.
The constitution clearly gives the govermnents, federal, state, and local, the right to sieze property through eminent domain for "the public good". All I see hear is that the supreme court rightly left that decision at the local level.
If the people living in the community don't like this, they have all the power in the world to change the people who made the decision.
I guess maybe more people should have been voting in local elections all along.
Nightcrawler's teleportation isn't instant, he's travelling through an intervening dimension. He doesn't pass through points A and B in the "Real" world, but there is a non-zero time between disappearing at A and appearing at B.
This was very obvious in the movie, of course, but even in the comics you can usually see that there's a slight lag.
Ha, just the opposite, the studios have the theater owners by the balls. Studios get the vast majority of ticket sales during a film's initial opening weeks, theaters only start getting their cut later on, when 99% of showings have mostly empty theaters.
As much as they gouge you for ticket sales, food, and ads, most theaters *barely* squeak by, especially if they're not a massive chain. Every place I've lived in the last few years has seen dozens of formerly small independent theaters shut down because they just couldn't make money.
No surprise that there's talk of "gourmet" food for astronauts. The Navy has long had a tradition of assigning the best chefs to submarines, with the thought that if you're trapped in a tin can for several months, at least if the food is good it will help morale a little.
Now make that tin can even smaller and send it out into space, I can see where astronauts would be craving some fine food after a few months.
I *guarantee* there are more jedi out there post-Sith than Yoda and Obi-Wan. First, it's somewhat foreshadowed by Obi-Wan changing the "Distress signal" to alert other jedis to stay away.
Second, and much more important, Lucas is commiting to a tv series and a clone wars cartoon that both do not feature major characters from the movies, and that take place between episodes 3 and 4.
Conclusion: No way in hell are they making either of those shows without jedis in them. Therefore, there are other jedis, dark and light, still scattered around the galaxy.
I actually know of a case of a scientist smuggling genetically-modified mice into the country in his pants, to get around obstacles to a) getting the mice *out* of the source lab and b) getting them *in* to his lab.
Pretty much the whole incident got a shake-of-the-head then a wink-and-a-nod from the scientist's peers and superiors.
It's no surprise to me that unethical behaviour often gets a blind eye in academic circles. After all, same thing happens in corporate circles. And in Political Circles.
. . . that's no moon.
"Samba is the only remaining major competitor of Microsoft in this market."
Uh, what market is that? File serving? EMC, Network Appliance, SNAP, and others might challenge that. Maybe I really just don't understand what "market" is being referred to here.
In my experience, 9 times out of 10 when a game has horrible crappy voice acting, it's because they specifically did *not* hire professional voice actors, but instead got developers or friends or random people on the street to do it.
Does no one else remember the horrifying voice of Richard Garriot as Lord British in Ultima VII?
UF used to be funny enough, but I lost interest in it long ago when I realized I hadn't laughed at it for months. I've been a sysadmin for 10+ years so I find the setting humorous enough, but stopped finding the jokes funny a long time ago. Every time I check back from time to time it still just doesn't do anything for me. Of course, I also stopped reading Dilbert as well. It just felt like I reached a point where I had apparently seen all the author's available jokes and was just seeing them recycled in various ways over and over.
Oh, the windows user is stoopid, and the tech support guy has to take calls from stoopid lusers! Ho ho ho! How droll!
This study is highly suspect. The total population was I believe only about 3,000, which is not huge, and specifically in the UK, which is a fairly small region, how does one control for cultural pressures?
For example, the engineering professions have a higher concentration of Indians and Asian, both cultures that sometimes have a strong preference against girls, even to the point of infanticide in some extreme cases.
What if the apparent genetic selection against females is really the result of some incidents of selective abortion?
If the author's point was that a lot more intersexed children are being born than we think, this study might have some interesting conclusions, but since that is not actually mentioned in the blurbs I've read (exclusions by the media are certainly possible) one has to assume they literally mean more genetically male children are being born to certain parents. The mechanism for this if true would be fairly fascinating, since males produce X and Y sperm in equal amounts, and there has not been any documented mechanism by which a given egg would give preferential selection to a particular X or Y sperm.
Almost certainly it was a corporate policy. My own company has had the lawyers pushing for a couple years no to have mandatory email deletion after only a few weeks, and the previous company did the same. Literally, no exceptions, they were going to force IT to auto-delete anything based on age, and the policy was going to be that if people needed to keep an email they should print it out and file it.
That pressure from the lawyers stopped not too long ago. I guess we have SOX to thank for that.
Needing to call someone to rent out hardware to respond to peak load is not going to be conducive to uptime during unexpected peak loads.
Do you really want your ecommerce site, the lifeblood of your revenue, going down even for a couple hours because it got linked to from slashdot? I don't.
Every time I find some website or service not working because it's "too busy" I grumble about businesses not speccing their systems for a reasonable peak load. (Blizzard, I'm looking in your direction.)
As for why not put a billion services all on one big box, I'm not completely opposed to the idea, but one thing I would be concerned about is single point of failure. Having 1,000 small systems instead of one 1,000 cpu system means that one system being down means that most of the services I provide are still up.
The level of cost and resources required to really hit that 99.999% uptime number, especially if you don't cheat and not count routine maintenance, is HUGE.
My years of experience increasingly make me feel that, failure happens. No matter how expensive your infrastructure, or how much redundancy you have, at some point something somewhere fails. I prefer, as much as possible to limit the ability of any one failure to affect other services.
Heck, Google is a great example of why a bajillion small web servers can be a lot better than one or two big ones. Last I read they expect a failure rate of something like 1 web server/day, but they can replace them quickly and easily without anyone noticing a service interruption.
I'm not opposed to service consolidation when it makes sense, but I'm not sure I agree with this growing trend some IT managers follow of putting all their eggs in one basket.
I don't know about *useless* unless one is going to argue that movie ticket prices have come down since 1996.
Simply adjusting for inflation alone also doesn't necessarily give useful numbers. There are a *lot* more movie screens available now than there were in the 1950s, for example.
Now let's see a list based on average number of tickets sold/screen!
It's not that complicated. Disk image backups and file-level backups are not intended to serve the same purpose.
Disk image backups are pure disaster recovery or deployment. Something is down and needs to be back up ASAP, where even the few minutes of recreating partitions and MBRs is unwanted. Or it's about deploying dozens or hundreds of client systems as quickly as possible with as few staff as possible.
File level backups are insurance for users. Someone deletes/edits/breaks something important and needs it back or an old version back, etc.
Sometimes, separating those two business needs (DR from user restoration) is the most sensible thing to do.
If it's anything like KotOR 1 or 2, double the single campaign playing time. After all, you *are* going to play through it as both Open Palm and Closed Fist, aren't you?
I have to agree, it looks like there's some great stuff in Tiger, but I just can't seem to care about file searching. I've been accumulating files and data for well over 20 years now, and I never find myself looking for files I can't find.
I guess this is a great boon for the disorganized though.
I, personally, think the Dashboard and Automator stuff is much more interesting than Spotlight, but Spotlight seems to get all the attention.
You know, every plant that we grow has been "genetically-modified".
Every plant or animal that the human race has domesticated is genetically modified. We just used to modify the genes through selective breeding and hybridization, etc. Now we can do it in labs.
I guess when Farmers did it, it was safe and natural, but when a guy in a white coat does it, he's sinning aggainst nature?
Personal attacks against the author rather than any attempt to dispute actual points....yup...that looks like a Wikipedian response if ever I read one. And one wonders why people, especially experts, would be "scared" to contribute?