You don't need a boating licence anywhere in the UK; every year the Lifeboat Service has to rescue a few dozen idiots who think that because they can drive a car they can drive a boat ten times the size. The Gov. is considering having a licence for medium bots (about big enough to sleep on upwards).
The Thames has been massively cleaned up over the last 50 years. Yes, it is generally brown in colour; this is suspended sediment and not pollution. Fifty years ago it was essentially dead; recently the counted (I think) over fifty species in it, including salmon and seal. Not that it couldn't do with a bit more cleaning up, but it is enormously improved.
Which means that it could do without a load of speedboat/cars on it.
That is the average income, but with a lot of spread - less for peasants in the country (more than half the population), more for city dwellers, especially in tech jobs.
But an expensive mobile beats no phone at all. Land lines take for ever to obtain, whereas a mobile is avalabl now.
A lot of very poor countries may skip the land line stage altogether outside the major cities. If you reckong the cost of new infrastructure in, mobiles are cheaper from a standing start than laying landlines in all but the densest conurbations. And, usually, better. Mobile benefits, plus no-one steals the valuable cop[per wires. Base stations can pu put in safe buildings.
The replacement for Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to be launched by Ariane 5. It is arguable that the existance of Shuttle made the designers of Hubble lazy: they started from the payload of the Shuttle and worked backwards. But technology has moved on a lot.
Again, one of the things that ISS is supposed to give us is space assembly capability, both in terms of knowhow and having people in orbit to do/supervize assembly. Lob it up to ISS orbit, assemble it there, then use high-efficiency ion drives to transfer it to wherever it needs to live. If you have enough thrust, bring it back to LEO for repairs and refuelling (you take your car to be fixed rather than have a mechanic come round, don't you?).
The successor to the James Webb, still very much on the drawing board, is currently planned to do the same interferometry thing optically as the radio astronomers do for their very long baseline interferometry. Several small satellites will fly in formation very accurately, giving a mirror with an effective aperture of hundreds of meters. But each satellite can be launched separately.
The article is pretty confusing. This is not a barcode at all: it is just setting up the number space that will be used for RFID tags. All that has been decided, AFAICS, is that it will be a 96 bit code in the RFID chip, MIT will hold the central registgry, and many interested manufacturers are meeting to agree on how to divide up and administer that 96 bit space.
Bit of a "Duh" if you ask me. Of course it has to be done, but this is pure implementation territory: it doiesn't affect the privacy issues on bit.
Mind you, I do wonder what the delta cost on the RFID chip of moving from 96 bit to (say) 128 bit - or even 256-bit. While I agree that these things are going to be produced in trillions and therefore millionths of a cent add up, I would have thought that most of the cost was constant per unit - slicing, packaging, testing etc.
2. Are the various HW RAID solutions compatible with each other? My nightmare is buying a card or a motherboard with a built-in RAID, and if I then experience a hardware error in the card or mb, I must replace the faulty card/mb with more or less exactly the same type? (This will probably occur three months after the hw goes out of production)
In my experience, no. The Mylex raids we used "borrowed" a small amount of disk at the start of the drive for its own purposes. I would think it very unlikely that the other brands would borrow the same amount. And also, you couldn't just plug the drive straight in, or with a non-Raid controller, which would be a possible solution if you are using plain mirroring. Maybe another controller from the same manufacturer - the next-generation successor to the failing one - will be the same. We supplied a number of thos mylex controllers, and spares-stocked them, but you have a relevant worry.
I wouldn't bet more than usually leery of IBM. Every drive manufacturer I have known has, at some time or another, had a faulty drive family. These things are cost-engineered to within an inch of their lives. It only takes one component to be a little over stripped down and you get a systematic fault in the whole line of drives. The design team learn from their mistake (after a million drives have shipped) and that team won't make that mistake again. But there are several design teams out there, and plenty of new mistakes to make. A year after the big flap, the next genration from that manufacturer are probably *better* than the average, because of the usual overreaction.
People have posted various lists of things to do/not to do - most of them pretty obvious, IMO. Our office is pretty polite, and most of these things happen without rules needing to be stated. The one thing that does cause problems is ad-hoc meetings. A goes to ask B a question, C walking past or at a nearby desk joins in, they call over D, who also has an input to the problem.
In one sense this is good - communications between the members of the team has improved. Those interactions might not have happened in closed of offices. But, if you are involved in the project, opinions can get heated and the discussion a bit loud for others in the area. So you must have some separate areas for ad-hoc as well as formal meetings, and you must try to move off to them if the discussion starts getting heated. But don't formalise it too much - if you stop the discussion until you can get a pre-booked room, all spontaneity and inspiration will disappear.
I find that my typing rate drops by about a third and my number of errors doubles if I think someone is watching ove my shoulder. Just nerves. But, from an employers point of view, that would be a serious drop in my productivity.
True, for general purpose computing, which is probably what most/.ers probably do. But this sort of massive processing power is really only needed for the simulation people, who do large amounts of contoguous number cruncong, such as matrix multiplies. That sort of thing will be speeded up enormously by this sort of architecture.
As a concept, this is hardly new. There have been all sorts of different parallel processing architectures over the years - SIMD, MIMD, strings, arrays, etc. Each has performed well on one particular class of problem, but generally crashed out as soon as you move away from its sweet spot. For example, changing gear from array mode (lots of big matrix ops) to linear mode (making decisions on the results) tends to lose most of the time gained by the array processor. OTOH, clusters of general purpose processors tend to wast time on memory or object contention unless they are working on highly decomposable problems.
Maybe this architecture is a better compromise that its many predecessors. (It ought to be - IBM built enough of them). But don't expect to use them youself, unless you work for an advanced engineering company, a weather forecaster or the DoD.
This is a test of your management, not you. That is what management is for, for heavens sake.
You should have a line manager to whom you report. Yes, of course you provide a service to a zillion different departments, but there should be one person to whome you report. Possibly the guy who hired you. Or the guy who says you can't have any more budget. This is his problem.
If that guy is totally pointy-haired, then there is nothing you can do. Start looking for another job. Because even if you solve this problem, another will come along, and another, and another... Better to jump early that to drop out from exhaustion.
But assuming your boss is not totally pointy haired, then all you need to do is to dump the stuff on his desk. When people come and make the excessive demands, package the whole lot up, take it to him and say "this represents 200% of what I can possibly do - please choose the half you want me to do, and prioritise it, the tell the other half they cannot have what they want", It is his job, not yours to palacate the enraged user. There may be a few iterations, as different users use their different powewrs to escalate their requests (or drop them because they weren't that important, or there is another way to do them).
Obviously, your boss will try to get a bit more out of you - ask for 110% of that 200%. Don't give in to this. Make that 100% honest, then stick to it. If your boss fires you for an honest statement of what you can do, then he is too pointy haired to work for. And don't let him squeeze your estimates - if you say four days for a job, it is four days, not three. You are the techy, it is your job to make those estimates - and to get them more or less right. He is the manager, it is his job to use those estimates to get the best value for the company from your skills. Respect his skills - do the things he prioritises, not the ones you would like to do. But demand that he respect your skills and doesn't override your technical judgement.
To summarise: you need to learn to say no to only one person: your manager. If you cannot set up a decent relationship with him/her, the job has no long term prospects: head for the lifeboats fast. If you can set up such a relationship (and it is a core function of technical management to have such relationships), then you can simply pass the buck upwards.
People are using the term "nanotechnology" for two very different things.
One is nanomachines. These are, as you say, in a very early stages yet and present no risk at all at this point. Some of the doom-omngers have taken some of the wildest prodictions of self-reproducing nanomachines (a very, very blue sky concept at this point) and the possibility that they could run amuck, turning the earth to so-called "grey goo". We already have self-reproducing nanomachines - viruses, bacteria, insects. The world is not yet a grey goo, as far as I can see (but my office has a window, so I can at least see Real Life).
The other use of the term is what this article is about - materials manufactured as ultra-fine particles. Such materials show distinctly different properties from the same materials in bulk form. Such differences might, for example, include being carcinogenic. Many other materiels become more carcinogenic in smaller forms: hitting you with a lump of asbostos will raise no more than a bruise, breathing in fibres will give you cancer.
So there is a safety case for stronger review of finely divided materiels before letting them into the environment. But this is not an end-of-the world scenario. But panic mongers have been going straight from "finely divided titanium oxide may be a bit carcinogenic" to "Flee - the grey goo is upon us".
And, quite possibly, with the legal bills SCO would rack up defending a countersuit from all the users they've threatened, just implode them before the case ever gets to trial. This would be good for IBM and Open Source.
I don't think that would be good for Open Source: it would leave a shadow over the Linux for evermore. Anothe set of lawyer-ghouls could always buy the rights from the deceased SCO and start again. We need to get this to court and settled as fast as possible.
Two possible outcomes: 1. No infringment. Burn, SCO, burn 2. Infringement. The infringing code is dropped fast, and the Linux community rewrites it fast. SCO says this is not possible. I think that that the OS Community - at Warp Factor 10 - could do it in three months. A fine for IBM - which won't kill them. Linux carries on with FUD removed.
What we need is for someone to force SCO to reveal the allegedly infinging code - in public, not under NDA. Cannot someone get a ruling that, since it will have to be disclosed in court, it should be disclosed now?
DeBeers is truly an evil company sown on the blood of africa and putting them out of business would do the world a favor.
No argument on the first. But if the way of putting DeBeers out of business is to destroy the mined diamond industry completely, so that all the miners get nothing instead of too little, is that actually doing the world a favour?
Not that I think you can do anything about it: the cat is truly out of the bag. Diamond miners may go the way of all the horse breeders, feed suppliers, blacksmiths, farriers etc. put out of business by the automobile industry. Even if DeBeers (improbably) managed to buy and close down the two companies mentioned in the Wired article, I am sure others would appear within about a couple of years. Manufactured diamonds is an idea whose time has come - especially with the pressure from the technology industry.
Which leaves us, as always, wondering what to do about Africa. I have no idea, but generally speaking, mining is an industry which does more harm than good - and I am speaking socially and politically, rather then econologically (though it is also ecologically bad). A recent study (sorry, no ref to hand) showed tha, in the long term, contries with mineral wealth do worse than those without: mineral wealth is too easy for Bad Guys to dominate and skim the profits while running the country down.
This protest seems to me rather over the top, tinfoil helmet to me.
Of course, if nobody does anything, RFIDs could be used to infring liberty.
But what ills are not overcome by requiring that RFIDs should be clearly marked, and removable without damaging the goods to which they are attached. On items with packaging, such as the razors, they should be in the packaging. On items without packaging such as clothes, attache them with thos little plastic tags they already use for prices and useless information about the manufacturer.
To police it, ensure that an inexpensive scanner is available which allows a domestic user to detect any RFIDs thay have not removed. The fine on the company in the event of infringing the above rules (i.e. putting hidden RFIDs im) to include an element of reward to the finder of the hidden ID of at least the cost of such a scanner.
If you then remove all IDs when you get home - no more onerous than unpacking and removing those tags, then the only time the shop knows about them is as you leave for the first time. If you paid for them, they know that from the checkout. If you didn't, then presumably you are stealing them and deserve what happens to you.
This doesn't require wholesale observance to make it destroy the effective use to infringe privacy impossible. If more people than not remove the RFIDs (as they would) the residual information becomes effectively useless.
Of course, the CIA could always attach an RFID to your backside and track you wherever - but no law or consumer protest is going to stop that.
If it works, it could allow shops to cut losses by (say) 5%. If the marketplace works, this should cut end user prices by (say) 4.95%. Which may not sound be much, but if I got a 5% pay rise today (which is the same thing), I would go home happy.
This system seems to have tripped across a common problem with all id recognition systems - face, retina, voice, fingerprint, whatever. That is that they are used in two completely different modes.
One mode is the verification mode: this person claims to be Mr XYZ: is he? For this purpose, you only have one identity to match. If the answer comes out "maybe" instead of "yes" or "no", you can take another photo/scan/whatever. You can use extremely number intensive checking techniques because you are only trying to match ONE face/eye/... to ONE record. And the people being checked have at least some incentive to help their system (remove glasses, get a rescan when they have hair cut or grow beard). Systems can be made to do this very reliably in this mode - call it mode 1.
You can scale this up a little bit, while maintaining reliability. A car, for example, might recognise the voices of four registered drivers and adjust itself to suit, or a secure area form a few tens of people. Call this mode 1A.
The second mode is when you are trying to detect any one of a large list of possible people in a huge crowd, when they may have changed their characteristics significantly, either intentionalyy or unintentionally. Call this mode 2.
The trouble is that a lot of people assume that, if you can scale from 1 to 1A, the scaling from 1A to 2 will be linear. Which it won't. As well as the linear scaling of vastly more records to match (a linear scaleing), there is the the no-rescan, chjanged face, uncooperative facto, which acts quadratically with the fist. This means the problem explodes uncontrollably very soon.
Some of the people making this assumption should know better.
People have been predicting that solid state will replace hard drives for at least a decade now, probably more. But HDDs have kept ahead in large capacity throughout that time, and manufacturers still hav3e quite a lot of technology up their sleeves. The only way that flash is going to catch up with HDD in the nect 5 years (I predict no futher) is if the need for space is satisfied. And when you have got video and broadbabd, people will carry on filling HDD space with downloads, or more software or... This gadget said $0.37/Mbyte. The last disk I bought ran about $0.015/Mbyte, and that was a while back.
And using flash for a swap drive... Remeber that flash as a limited number of write cycles - perhaps 1 million. For picture storasge - no problem. For file storage - not likely to be a problem, becauss eht file space will eventually find its way into a long-lived firl. But for swap space, you might run out of write cycles sooner than you hope.
You have two separate problems here. Differential pricing, and secret pricing.
I have no problem with differntial pricing.As my example shows, it can lead to everybody being better off. The FAA rules to which you refer are purely the airline industry and its statutory guardian agreen to enforce the rules they need to keep pricing different. The benefits that the fat cat get cost far, far, less than the extra cost of his ticket - but they allow him to justify it on his expenses claim.
Secret pricing is completely different. Markets only work if prices are open. Sellers who are pricing differentially should give a full price list, and the restrictions they placee on each class of ticket. A backp[packer should know what the fat cat is paying for his ticket, and what he gets for the premium. And, of course, vice versa. It actually happens in flying - corporate travel departments will shop around to find tickets at the best price.
Thinking only of widgets is the 19th century pattern, when the economy consisted mostly of things whose cost of production didn't change much with quantity. Nowadays, the economy consists mostly of services and service charges, or high initial tooling costs which must be recovered in a short product life. Widgets can be put on the shelf until the next customer: transport perishes as soon as the flight leaves. Software costs millions to write and cents to copy: if you sell software ar copying costs, you go bust.
Firstly, dump the inferior product stuff. This is not what this is about.
It is about the fact that the same thing has a different value to different people, and therefore it makes sense to charge them a different price.
Example. Plane has 100 seats, and it costs $10,000 to fly from A to B. Ticket therefore $100. But there are only 20 people willing to pay $100: $2,000 is less than $10,000, so no fly. Passengers and airline very unhappy. But some of those 20 would pay more than $100 because they really want to travel. Say 10 would pay $500 and 10 would pay the necessary $100. $6,000 already, and 80 seats free. If you can get 80 backpackers to pay $50 ("half price"), we have a flight. Paseengers and airline both happy. Nobody has paid more than their personal top price, though some have paid more than others. The world has gained from discriminatory pricing.
Of course, if the $500 dollar guy can do it, he will buy a $50 ticket. He doesn't want to pay over the odds, he just accepts he has to. So you create a first class section for him, give hime rebooking priviliges and lick his boots. The backpackers, however, are getting rock bott0m pricces, so you give them minimal space and lock them to fixed times with "Saturday away" requirements. Not that they particularly want these things (they may be a bit useful, but not much). But they want to keep the fat cats out of the alley cat seats.
The law jumps on them heavily. Ethnic/racial discrimination is illegal.
But why/em?. Companies are profit making entities, and French/Arab money is as good as any other. Racisim by companies is racism by individuals exerted through their company power.
If they want to be prejudiced, other mechanisms as good/bad/illegal as pricing are available.
It's not advertising they are offering you - it is discounts. They are not only targetting you, they have probably hit you. Are you in an airline Frequent Flyer Program? Any store cards that give you discounts or cash back? Magazine subscriptions at below newsstand prices? All these are examples of differential pricing - some people pay more than others for the sazme thing. In return, usually, for repeat business. But to identify repeat business, you have to allow yourself to be identified so thay can spot you coming back.
The only way to avoid this is to pay list price (and probably in cash) for everything. Can be done, but comes expensivew. And people have voted with their wallets to have discounts, not privacy. Words are fine, but how much is privacy worth? Not much, says John Q. Public.
int foo, *bar; creates an integer named foo, and a pointer to an int named bar. Right? Or am I wrong?
So you have one declaration line which created variables of two totally disinct types. Fine for the opriginal creator, lousy for the maintainer, who sees a line declaring ints and had to do a serious double take to find that some of them are actually pointers. Abuse further as
int foo, *bar, flash, *bang, up, *down, left, *right;
Without reading the line again, what was the type of "up"?
And as for the other, I can never define any sort of function pointer in one line: I always have to typedef tthe function and then have a pointer to it. While I can work out, with a manual in hand, how to do it in one line, the syntax is so unintuitive that I never do it: I will just have to reach for the manual again wh en I maintain it.
The mistake I would junk is allowing enum {fred=36, bill=19, joe=333} ; Which confuses predefined constants with the classic enumeration. The cost saving of a lookup table to convert the 0, 1, 2 sequence is tiny, and the knock on effects are horrible.
No - the version I thought of was flying a plane. They have an instrument landing trainer which is a business jet with the flight deck duplicated 12 times in the main cabin, with the real instrument displays but dummy controls which just get logged so the trainees can pracice instrument landings "for real" 12 at a time, with feedback on how they did. The found that if they averaged the controls of all the trainees, they were at least as good as one trained pilot. Interestin, but not useful - you aren't going to fit any real plane with 12 pilots seats.
by John Brunner, in "The Shockwave Rider", based heavily in Alvin Tofler's "Future Shock".
The principle is called Delphi Polling. It is based on the observed fact that the aggregate answers of a large number of people sufficiently knowlegeable to understand a question seem, empirically, to be more accurate than the anwers of any one expert. Even though the answers of any one non-expert may be wildly out, the errors cancel out to a good approximation of the correct answer. Futurologists have been using it for a while to predict trends, and it works better than tea leaves, crystal balls and just plain "informed opinion" i.e. guesses. The USN even tried it with flying a plane, and it worked there too.
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You don't need a boating licence anywhere in the UK; every year the Lifeboat Service has to rescue a few dozen idiots who think that because they can drive a car they can drive a boat ten times the size. The Gov. is considering having a licence for medium bots (about big enough to sleep on upwards).
The Thames has been massively cleaned up over the last 50 years. Yes, it is generally brown in colour; this is suspended sediment and not pollution. Fifty years ago it was essentially dead; recently the counted (I think) over fifty species in it, including salmon and seal. Not that it couldn't do with a bit more cleaning up, but it is enormously improved.
Which means that it could do without a load of speedboat/cars on it.
That is the average income, but with a lot of spread - less for peasants in the country (more than half the population), more for city dwellers, especially in tech jobs.
But an expensive mobile beats no phone at all. Land lines take for ever to obtain, whereas a mobile is avalabl now.
A lot of very poor countries may skip the land line stage altogether outside the major cities. If you reckong the cost of new infrastructure in, mobiles are cheaper from a standing start than laying landlines in all but the densest conurbations. And, usually, better. Mobile benefits, plus no-one steals the valuable cop[per wires. Base stations can pu put in safe buildings.
The replacement for Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to be launched by Ariane 5. It is arguable that the existance of Shuttle made the designers of Hubble lazy: they started from the payload of the Shuttle and worked backwards. But technology has moved on a lot.
Again, one of the things that ISS is supposed to give us is space assembly capability, both in terms of knowhow and having people in orbit to do/supervize assembly. Lob it up to ISS orbit, assemble it there, then use high-efficiency ion drives to transfer it to wherever it needs to live. If you have enough thrust, bring it back to LEO for repairs and refuelling (you take your car to be fixed rather than have a mechanic come round, don't you?).
The successor to the James Webb, still very much on the drawing board, is currently planned to do the same interferometry thing optically as the radio astronomers do for their very long baseline interferometry. Several small satellites will fly in formation very accurately, giving a mirror with an effective aperture of hundreds of meters. But each satellite can be launched separately.
The article is pretty confusing. This is not a barcode at all: it is just setting up the number space that will be used for RFID tags. All that has been decided, AFAICS, is that it will be a 96 bit code in the RFID chip, MIT will hold the central registgry, and many interested manufacturers are meeting to agree on how to divide up and administer that 96 bit space.
Bit of a "Duh" if you ask me. Of course it has to be done, but this is pure implementation territory: it doiesn't affect the privacy issues on bit.
Mind you, I do wonder what the delta cost on the RFID chip of moving from 96 bit to (say) 128 bit - or even 256-bit. While I agree that these things are going to be produced in trillions and therefore millionths of a cent add up, I would have thought that most of the cost was constant per unit - slicing, packaging, testing etc.
2. Are the various HW RAID solutions compatible with each other? My nightmare is buying a card or a motherboard with a built-in RAID, and if I then experience a hardware error in the card or mb, I must replace the faulty card/mb with more or less exactly the same type? (This will probably occur three months after the hw goes out of production)
In my experience, no. The Mylex raids we used "borrowed" a small amount of disk at the start of the drive for its own purposes. I would think it very unlikely that the other brands would borrow the same amount. And also, you couldn't just plug the drive straight in, or with a non-Raid controller, which would be a possible solution if you are using plain mirroring. Maybe another controller from the same manufacturer - the next-generation successor to the failing one - will be the same. We supplied a number of thos mylex controllers, and spares-stocked them, but you have a relevant worry.
I wouldn't bet more than usually leery of IBM. Every drive manufacturer I have known has, at some time or another, had a faulty drive family. These things are cost-engineered to within an inch of their lives. It only takes one component to be a little over stripped down and you get a systematic fault in the whole line of drives. The design team learn from their mistake (after a million drives have shipped) and that team won't make that mistake again. But there are several design teams out there, and plenty of new mistakes to make. A year after the big flap, the next genration from that manufacturer are probably *better* than the average, because of the usual overreaction.
Anyway, IBM sold their drive division to Hitachi.
People have posted various lists of things to do/not to do - most of them pretty obvious, IMO. Our office is pretty polite, and most of these things happen without rules needing to be stated. The one thing that does cause problems is ad-hoc meetings. A goes to ask B a question, C walking past or at a nearby desk joins in, they call over D, who also has an input to the problem.
In one sense this is good - communications between the members of the team has improved. Those interactions might not have happened in closed of offices. But, if you are involved in the project, opinions can get heated and the discussion a bit loud for others in the area. So you must have some separate areas for ad-hoc as well as formal meetings, and you must try to move off to them if the discussion starts getting heated. But don't formalise it too much - if you stop the discussion until you can get a pre-booked room, all spontaneity and inspiration will disappear.
I find that my typing rate drops by about a third and my number of errors doubles if I think someone is watching ove my shoulder. Just nerves. But, from an employers point of view, that would be a serious drop in my productivity.
True, for general purpose computing, which is probably what most /.ers probably do. But this sort of massive processing power is really only needed for the simulation people, who do large amounts of contoguous number cruncong, such as matrix multiplies. That sort of thing will be speeded up enormously by this sort of architecture.
As a concept, this is hardly new. There have been all sorts of different parallel processing architectures over the years - SIMD, MIMD, strings, arrays, etc. Each has performed well on one particular class of problem, but generally crashed out as soon as you move away from its sweet spot. For example, changing gear from array mode (lots of big matrix ops) to linear mode (making decisions on the results) tends to lose most of the time gained by the array processor. OTOH, clusters of general purpose processors tend to wast time on memory or object contention unless they are working on highly decomposable problems.
Maybe this architecture is a better compromise that its many predecessors. (It ought to be - IBM built enough of them). But don't expect to use them youself, unless you work for an advanced engineering company, a weather forecaster or the DoD.
This is a test of your management, not you. That is what management is for, for heavens sake.
You should have a line manager to whom you report. Yes, of course you provide a service to a zillion different departments, but there should be one person to whome you report. Possibly the guy who hired you. Or the guy who says you can't have any more budget. This is his problem.
If that guy is totally pointy-haired, then there is nothing you can do. Start looking for another job. Because even if you solve this problem, another will come along, and another, and another... Better to jump early that to drop out from exhaustion.
But assuming your boss is not totally pointy haired, then all you need to do is to dump the stuff on his desk. When people come and make the excessive demands, package the whole lot up, take it to him and say "this represents 200% of what I can possibly do - please choose the half you want me to do, and prioritise it, the tell the other half they cannot have what they want", It is his job, not yours to palacate the enraged user. There may be a few iterations, as different users use their different powewrs to escalate their requests (or drop them because they weren't that important, or there is another way to do them).
Obviously, your boss will try to get a bit more out of you - ask for 110% of that 200%. Don't give in to this. Make that 100% honest, then stick to it. If your boss fires you for an honest statement of what you can do, then he is too pointy haired to work for. And don't let him squeeze your estimates - if you say four days for a job, it is four days, not three. You are the techy, it is your job to make those estimates - and to get them more or less right. He is the manager, it is his job to use those estimates to get the best value for the company from your skills. Respect his skills - do the things he prioritises, not the ones you would like to do. But demand that he respect your skills and doesn't override your technical judgement.
To summarise: you need to learn to say no to only one person: your manager. If you cannot set up a decent relationship with him/her, the job has no long term prospects: head for the lifeboats fast. If you can set up such a relationship (and it is a core function of technical management to have such relationships), then you can simply pass the buck upwards.
People are using the term "nanotechnology" for two very different things.
One is nanomachines. These are, as you say, in a very early stages yet and present no risk at all at this point. Some of the doom-omngers have taken some of the wildest prodictions of self-reproducing nanomachines (a very, very blue sky concept at this point) and the possibility that they could run amuck, turning the earth to so-called "grey goo". We already have self-reproducing nanomachines - viruses, bacteria, insects. The world is not yet a grey goo, as far as I can see (but my office has a window, so I can at least see Real Life).
The other use of the term is what this article is about - materials manufactured as ultra-fine particles. Such materials show distinctly different properties from the same materials in bulk form. Such differences might, for example, include being carcinogenic. Many other materiels become more carcinogenic in smaller forms: hitting you with a lump of asbostos will raise no more than a bruise, breathing in fibres will give you cancer.
So there is a safety case for stronger review of finely divided materiels before letting them into the environment. But this is not an end-of-the world scenario. But panic mongers have been going straight from "finely divided titanium oxide may be a bit carcinogenic" to "Flee - the grey goo is upon us".
And, quite possibly, with the legal bills SCO would rack up defending a countersuit from all the users they've threatened, just implode them before the case ever gets to trial. This would be good for IBM and Open Source.
I don't think that would be good for Open Source: it would leave a shadow over the Linux for evermore. Anothe set of lawyer-ghouls could always buy the rights from the deceased SCO and start again. We need to get this to court and settled as fast as possible.
Two possible outcomes:
1. No infringment. Burn, SCO, burn
2. Infringement. The infringing code is dropped fast, and the Linux community rewrites it fast. SCO says this is not possible. I think that that the OS Community - at Warp Factor 10 - could do it in three months. A fine for IBM - which won't kill them. Linux carries on with FUD removed.
What we need is for someone to force SCO to reveal the allegedly infinging code - in public, not under NDA. Cannot someone get a ruling that, since it will have to be disclosed in court, it should be disclosed now?
DeBeers is truly an evil company sown on the blood of africa and putting them out of business would do the world a favor.
No argument on the first. But if the way of putting DeBeers out of business is to destroy the mined diamond industry completely, so that all the miners get nothing instead of too little, is that actually doing the world a favour?
Not that I think you can do anything about it: the cat is truly out of the bag. Diamond miners may go the way of all the horse breeders, feed suppliers, blacksmiths, farriers etc. put out of business by the automobile industry. Even if DeBeers (improbably) managed to buy and close down the two companies mentioned in the Wired article, I am sure others would appear within about a couple of years. Manufactured diamonds is an idea whose time has come - especially with the pressure from the technology industry.
Which leaves us, as always, wondering what to do about Africa. I have no idea, but generally speaking, mining is an industry which does more harm than good - and I am speaking socially and politically, rather then econologically (though it is also ecologically bad). A recent study (sorry, no ref to hand) showed tha, in the long term, contries with mineral wealth do worse than those without: mineral wealth is too easy for Bad Guys to dominate and skim the profits while running the country down.
3) CRTs for monitors and TVs. I bet half the people reading this are looking at a vacuum tube, and have another one for watching TV.
This protest seems to me rather over the top, tinfoil helmet to me.
Of course, if nobody does anything, RFIDs could be used to infring liberty.
But what ills are not overcome by requiring that RFIDs should be clearly marked, and removable without damaging the goods to which they are attached. On items with packaging, such as the razors, they should be in the packaging. On items without packaging such as clothes, attache them with thos little plastic tags they already use for prices and useless information about the manufacturer.
To police it, ensure that an inexpensive scanner is available which allows a domestic user to detect any RFIDs thay have not removed. The fine on the company in the event of infringing the above rules (i.e. putting hidden RFIDs im) to include an element of reward to the finder of the hidden ID of at least the cost of such a scanner.
If you then remove all IDs when you get home - no more onerous than unpacking and removing those tags, then the only time the shop knows about them is as you leave for the first time. If you paid for them, they know that from the checkout. If you didn't, then presumably you are stealing them and deserve what happens to you.
This doesn't require wholesale observance to make it destroy the effective use to infringe privacy impossible. If more people than not remove the RFIDs (as they would) the residual information becomes effectively useless.
Of course, the CIA could always attach an RFID to your backside and track you wherever - but no law or consumer protest is going to stop that.
If it works, it could allow shops to cut losses by (say) 5%. If the marketplace works, this should cut end user prices by (say) 4.95%. Which may not sound be much, but if I got a 5% pay rise today (which is the same thing), I would go home happy.
This system seems to have tripped across a common problem with all id recognition systems - face, retina, voice, fingerprint, whatever. That is that they are used in two completely different modes.
One mode is the verification mode: this person claims to be Mr XYZ: is he? For this purpose, you only have one identity to match. If the answer comes out "maybe" instead of "yes" or "no", you can take another photo/scan/whatever. You can use extremely number intensive checking techniques because you are only trying to match ONE face/eye/... to ONE record. And the people being checked have at least some incentive to help their system (remove glasses, get a rescan when they have hair cut or grow beard). Systems can be made to do this very reliably in this mode - call it mode 1.
You can scale this up a little bit, while maintaining reliability. A car, for example, might recognise the voices of four registered drivers and adjust itself to suit, or a secure area form a few tens of people. Call this mode 1A.
The second mode is when you are trying to detect any one of a large list of possible people in a huge crowd, when they may have changed their characteristics significantly, either intentionalyy or unintentionally. Call this mode 2.
The trouble is that a lot of people assume that, if you can scale from 1 to 1A, the scaling from 1A to 2 will be linear. Which it won't. As well as the linear scaling of vastly more records to match (a linear scaleing), there is the the no-rescan, chjanged face, uncooperative facto, which acts quadratically with the fist. This means the problem explodes uncontrollably very soon.
Some of the people making this assumption should know better.
People have been predicting that solid state will replace hard drives for at least a decade now, probably more. But HDDs have kept ahead in large capacity throughout that time, and manufacturers still hav3e quite a lot of technology up their sleeves. The only way that flash is going to catch up with HDD in the nect 5 years (I predict no futher) is if the need for space is satisfied. And when you have got video and broadbabd, people will carry on filling HDD space with downloads, or more software or... This gadget said $0.37/Mbyte. The last disk I bought ran about $0.015/Mbyte, and that was a while back.
And using flash for a swap drive... Remeber that flash as a limited number of write cycles - perhaps 1 million. For picture storasge - no problem. For file storage - not likely to be a problem, becauss eht file space will eventually find its way into a long-lived firl. But for swap space, you might run out of write cycles sooner than you hope.
You have two separate problems here. Differential pricing, and secret pricing.
I have no problem with differntial pricing.As my example shows, it can lead to everybody being better off. The FAA rules to which you refer are purely the airline industry and its statutory guardian agreen to enforce the rules they need to keep pricing different. The benefits that the fat cat get cost far, far, less than the extra cost of his ticket - but they allow him to justify it on his expenses claim.
Secret pricing is completely different. Markets only work if prices are open. Sellers who are pricing differentially should give a full price list, and the restrictions they placee on each class of ticket. A backp[packer should know what the fat cat is paying for his ticket, and what he gets for the premium. And, of course, vice versa. It actually happens in flying - corporate travel departments will shop around to find tickets at the best price.
Thinking only of widgets is the 19th century pattern, when the economy consisted mostly of things whose cost of production didn't change much with quantity. Nowadays, the economy consists mostly of services and service charges, or high initial tooling costs which must be recovered in a short product life. Widgets can be put on the shelf until the next customer: transport perishes as soon as the flight leaves. Software costs millions to write and cents to copy: if you sell software ar copying costs, you go bust.
Firstly, dump the inferior product stuff. This is not what this is about.
It is about the fact that the same thing has a different value to different people, and therefore it makes sense to charge them a different price.
Example. Plane has 100 seats, and it costs $10,000 to fly from A to B. Ticket therefore $100. But there are only 20 people willing to pay $100: $2,000 is less than $10,000, so no fly. Passengers and airline very unhappy. But some of those 20 would pay more than $100 because they really want to travel. Say 10 would pay $500 and 10 would pay the necessary $100. $6,000 already, and 80 seats free. If you can get 80 backpackers to pay $50 ("half price"), we have a flight. Paseengers and airline both happy. Nobody has paid more than their personal top price, though some have paid more than others. The world has gained from discriminatory pricing.
Of course, if the $500 dollar guy can do it, he will buy a $50 ticket. He doesn't want to pay over the odds, he just accepts he has to. So you create a first class section for him, give hime rebooking priviliges and lick his boots. The backpackers, however, are getting rock bott0m pricces, so you give them minimal space and lock them to fixed times with "Saturday away" requirements. Not that they particularly want these things (they may be a bit useful, but not much). But they want to keep the fat cats out of the alley cat seats.
The law jumps on them heavily. Ethnic/racial discrimination is illegal.
But why/em?. Companies are profit making entities, and French/Arab money is as good as any other. Racisim by companies is racism by individuals exerted through their company power.
If they want to be prejudiced, other mechanisms as good/bad/illegal as pricing are available.
It's not advertising they are offering you - it is discounts. They are not only targetting you, they have probably hit you. Are you in an airline Frequent Flyer Program? Any store cards that give you discounts or cash back? Magazine subscriptions at below newsstand prices? All these are examples of differential pricing - some people pay more than others for the sazme thing. In return, usually, for repeat business. But to identify repeat business, you have to allow yourself to be identified so thay can spot you coming back.
The only way to avoid this is to pay list price (and probably in cash) for everything. Can be done, but comes expensivew. And people have voted with their wallets to have discounts, not privacy. Words are fine, but how much is privacy worth? Not much, says John Q. Public.
int foo, *bar; creates an integer named foo, and a pointer to an int named bar. Right? Or am I wrong?
So you have one declaration line which created variables of two totally disinct types. Fine for the opriginal creator, lousy for the maintainer, who sees a line declaring ints and had to do a serious double take to find that some of them are actually pointers. Abuse further as
int foo, *bar, flash, *bang, up, *down, left, *right;
Without reading the line again, what was the type of "up"?
And as for the other, I can never define any sort of function pointer in one line: I always have to typedef tthe function and then have a pointer to it. While I can work out, with a manual in hand, how to do it in one line, the syntax is so unintuitive that I never do it: I will just have to reach for the manual again wh
en I maintain it.
The mistake I would junk is allowing enum {fred=36, bill=19, joe=333} ; Which confuses predefined constants with the classic enumeration. The cost saving of a lookup table to convert the 0, 1, 2 sequence is tiny, and the knock on effects are horrible.
No - the version I thought of was flying a plane. They have an instrument landing trainer which is a business jet with the flight deck duplicated 12 times in the main cabin, with the real instrument displays but dummy controls which just get logged so the trainees can pracice instrument landings "for real" 12 at a time, with feedback on how they did. The found that if they averaged the controls of all the trainees, they were at least as good as one trained pilot. Interestin, but not useful - you aren't going to fit any real plane with 12 pilots seats.
by John Brunner, in "The Shockwave Rider", based heavily in Alvin Tofler's "Future Shock".
The principle is called Delphi Polling. It is based on the observed fact that the aggregate answers of a large number of people sufficiently knowlegeable to understand a question seem, empirically, to be more accurate than the anwers of any one expert. Even though the answers of any one non-expert may be wildly out, the errors cancel out to a good approximation of the correct answer. Futurologists have been using it for a while to predict trends, and it works better than tea leaves, crystal balls and just plain "informed opinion" i.e. guesses. The USN even tried it with flying a plane, and it worked there too.