Thank you for the reply! I definitely see where you're coming from on this topic, and think that all cases of abuse at the hands of a financial institution (or pseudo-institution, as the case may sometimes be) deserves close scrutiny.
However, the situation is always more complex than that. For example, a couple of quick minutes on Google yielded the following unto mine Konqueror:
Basically, pick any financial institution or payment processing company "X" and search for a hate site associated with it. You're almost certain to "win" each time. Now, I'm not saying that these companies are blameless by any stretch of the imagination. Case in point, I actually got messed over by Bank of America while I was working on the development team that wrote their telephone banking system software. Needless to say, I got the errors corrected rather quickly.
The problem is simple: any company doing business of any sort will come up against opposition, disgruntled customers, angry stockholders, etc. It's oftentimes difficult to weed out the "fact from fiction" in a lot of cases involving complex issues. I don't think there's a major national bank in existence that hasn't dealt with a major class-action lawsuit over policy issues.
That's where the trick comes in. These days, almost all institutions, from banks to brokerage houses, have strict and specific verbiage allowing them to "hang on to your cash" in the case of a perceived conflict. PayPal isn't even close to the worst I've seen of that sort of practice.
I suppose it really does come down to individual experience (and group communication of experience, very valuable). As for the sites that report on the misdeeds of these organizations, I say rock on. But, we've got to balance everything out. Frankly, PayPal has taken a heck of a lot less heat than is typical of a "newcomer" in the field, especially given the unsteady ground they started out to build their revenue stream on initially.
I attribute their success to good management. That doesn't mean they'll always have the benefit of intelligent people at the top, but as long as that's reasonably enough the case, I'm okay with them.
On the other hand, if they burned me badly I'd probably be first in line to register "GodIHateThoseScrewyBastards.com" too. It's just human nature to attempt to right wrongs, and I could even be in the wrong in that case without knowing it... almost makes my brain hurt trying to wrap the grey matter around that part.
I normally try not to be overly critical of most people I run into online (at least not in a bitchy way, moderators included), but I've got to agree with you on your stance concerning Michael's apparent delusional expectations of total privacy in the area of online transactions.
As a case in point, I'd like to mention that I know several folks personally who run small to mid-size online businesses. The majority of these people have access to (and use) "true" merchant account processing systems, some online and some offline (via batch at the end of the day). Even so, again and again I hear the same general sentiment when it comes to PayPal:
"When I have doubts about the nature of a large transaction or have concerns over fraud, I use PayPal in lieu of ordinary merchant channels."
To all who might support Michael's (seemingly ill-informed) stance on the issue, note that that's not me speaking, it's a LOT of people I talk to routinely. PayPal has built a reputation on taking exceptional care to prevent online fraud, through a variety of verification mechanisms. Not only that, those mechanisms are easily configured through the browser by accountholders. You can make fraud passing through you account as easy or difficult as you want, depending on your needs and the relationship with your customers.
Thank you, Accipiter. Micheal, please research this stuff more before you go off on one-line rants. Of course, you could always talk to the folks over at ThinkGeek; I'm certain they would be happy to impart their experience in transactions processing to you (I mean this in all seriousness, education really is a Good Thing).
I've never really had anything but a good experience with PayPal (and I've used it *heavily* for two years now). Maybe it's just my good fortune.
Well, okay, I do have one small gripe. Apparently, their site cannot be convinced that a certain customer of ours is browsing from the U.K., and as a result he's having to send us a check (brits read: cheque;) ) in lieu of PayPal funds transfers.
Hopefully their money market fund will see a bit of a recovery soon (1.9% == blegh), but hey, there's a whole slew of investment vehicles that aren't doing so well at the moment. Such is the state of the economy.
As for "overly tight fraud prevention measures", I'd like to hear from people who've simultaneously run a company basing his/her online transactions on "true" merchant account methods. Most e-based merchant account providers/processors don't place nearly the emphasis on security that PayPal does, and chargebacks are a real bitch (not to mention quite bad for P.R. if the customer who got ripped off is particularly angry about it).
Just my brief experience in these matters. Replies are very welcome!
This note relates to the/. thread found here concerning the spacing between the detectors in the ice-bound array.
I suppose that as long as the detectors maintain something above the minimum radiation traversal distance (I believe quoted in that thread as ~24 meters, don't know about the validity of that number), but within some outer bound distance limit, all should be well with the detection project.
Now, from grokking what I could from the PDF documents available at the primary project site, I believe the detectors are arranged in a "straw man" type formation specifically for the purpose of getting the most area out of the 1km^3 volume of ice. This would probably allow for some variance in the specific arrangement of the detectors (again, if this were monitored as I assume it will be).
God, I need to get back to work. This staying up for three days business can't last forever. Coffee is my friend...
seletz, upon further research into your point, I happened across this document on the UCSC site. It discusses the "slippage" behavior of the West Antarctic ice sheet in particular. I'm not certain what region specifically the proposed neutrino study site lies in (hopefully the Eastern sheet???), but this definitely lends weight to your inquiry into the changing nature of the ice.
Here's an excerpt concerning this region:
"The ice streams can be seen in satellite images as large features within the ice sheet about 500 kilometers (300 miles) long and 20 to 100 kilometers (10 to 60 miles) wide. They move at a rate of 1 to 2 meters per day, sliding over a bed of sediment saturated with liquid water. But if the bed becomes cold enough for the water in it to start freezing, the loss of lubrication causes the ice stream to slow and eventually stop moving, Tulaczyk said."
Now, that is definitely some significant movement in the ice sheet. One can only presume that the researchers on this project have very carefully chosen the coordinates for the "telescope" placement to avoid this kind of nasty possibility. However, even the general settling and compacting of ice layers will inevitably produce some movement, even in an area limited to 1^3K.
As per my earlier reply, I guess that close monitoring of and allowances for such shifts have been incorporated into the project design specifications. At least, for $15M USD I'd certainly hope so!:).
It remains to be seen, however, if our species can manage to mess up the climate in the chosen region enough over 10 years to irreparably skew the results...
(from page 2, par 2): "... We show that this limit is accessible by operating a kilometer-scale neutrino observatory over several years."
(from page 2, par 3): "... Although the flux from a single source may still be small, this conclusion is credible because a neutrino telescope will be operated for a decade."
Basically, I think the intrinsic accuracy in the system lies largely in the fact that it will be operated for a long duration. This temporal note affects multiple portions of the problem, acting as an averaging and error-correction mechanism (at least as far as I can tell).
So, given enough data (ala' Seti@Home), it should be possible to pay attention to the general outstanding trends produced from analysis, even given somewhat of a shift or "settling/sliding" in ice conditions.
Please forgive me awful German; I tried to grok the site you pointed me at, but it just made my brain hurt:(. I need to bone up on more than just my native tongue (comes in handy for playing chess online too).
Hmm... very good question indeed. This page shows the major tectonic plates involved.
It seems to me that they've got a fairly wide berth in area (given the relatively small size of the selected region for usage) for the purposes of the project. Apparently, the vast majority of Antarctica is comprised on a single major plate.
To the best of my knowledge (albeit limited), the greater portion of this region is relatively seismically stable as a result. Of course, they'd want to stay away from "boundary regions".
That's about all I've got. Anyone got more firm data on this?
matt-fu, you are absolutely correct:). See what too much Perl does to you? You start to desperately want answers you could easily find for yourself;). I need mo' coffee now...
In all seriousness, upon further consideration of my (parent) post, a certain quote comes to mind:
"There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks."
I seem to recall this being most true of filesystems and databases. Hell, I've got a couple of decent PIII machines not doing much, time to have some fun (perhaps later on, buy new hard drives after my "tests" cause platter issues...).
Geez, are the moderators in a bad mood tonight? Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna lose some karma for this one (not to worry, stuck at 50;) )... but still, this is an obvious joke on the/. effect in all its glory...
I think humour is a large part of what keeps/. from becoming a 90% dreary place (given the rapid rate of "bad news" recently) altogether.
Of course, this could just be inter-geek jealousy over the fact that seann has a girlfriend;););).
Anybody have any real-world benchmarks we can have a look at? I hate to sound redundant on this, but performance is a big issue for web/file servers (which is mostly what I'm running these days).
If the "running the hell out of it" scenarios look good, I'll probably give it a shot on a production box. Actually, knowing me, I'll give it a shot anyhow, but hey...;)
Just as a thought, I'm operating from a starting assumption that it's *pretty much* just ext2 with journaling, but it's the overhead for the journaling that raises my eyebrows just a tad...
"I mean, VA has no reason to support Slashdot, Sourceforge, Themes.org, and other very expensive sites that produce zero revenue."
Hmm... not too sure about this one. I haven't looked at the financials for these sites/the business units that run them (and the ad market is admittedly in sad shape these days), but I would hesitate to say they bring in zero revenue. This is probably least true of Slashdot and ThinkGeek.
"Our biggest cheerleader has switched sides on us and we are going to be in serious trouble."
I really don't see how the name change says they're "switching side on us"; you're right that they've done some shady stuff related to their opening day, but this goes a bit overboard. It's not like they're completely dropping anything and everything to do with Linux to run off and write software for Windows XP only.
"VB programmers are a dime a dozen and can be hired for $30k a year, so why would a software company want to hire anyone else?"
I don't know any decent VB programmers (and there are those who can do amazing stuff with the language... I happen to have done extensive VB work in my time) who would be willing to work for $30K a year. Any manager hiring such a person has to know s/he's setting him/herself up for a disaster.
When you're talking about software development, it's the developers that determine the expense these days (as opposed to the environment). Your statement may have been true 5 years ago, but not anymore. It all depends on what your developers are most comfortable with using.
How about the thousands of web hosting companies out there that use Linux in all its varied distros?
How about software companies that are beginning (and some that have been for some time) to offer *nix software development services?
How about the embedded folks and various appliance devices that use variants on Linux?
I don't think Linux will be vanishing anytime soon if one company bites the dust. Just because the (literally) thousands of companies out there supporting Linux aren't necessarily "household names" doesn't mean they don't have significant impact.
At first glance, your post seemed to smell of troll... upon further consideration, it just seems dumb. Sorry to be harsh.
I can recall LOTS of cases where I've seen kiosks for other game consoles "down and out" so to speak. It's a pretty common occurence, really.
You have to think about the fact that these units sometimes have to put up with a lot of abuse when on public display. Yes, they're oftentimes enclosed in plexiglass and such, but that's not total protection.
On the other hand, I do know that these boxes run a good deal hotter than your average console, owing to increased "power". Taking that into account, a nice tight protective enclosure might not be such a great idea (I wouldn't try sealing my box up in a tight space and running it 24x7 either).
Of course, on the *really* personal opinion side of this, I think Microsoft has probably goofed when it comes to designing this thing to really last. It's overjuiced in my opinion, runs entirely too hot (and might be too fragile too) for constant use and bumping "by the kids" (hey, I'm a big kid, all that about more expensive toys, yada yada yada).
Man, just when I thought my little bubble world could be Microsoft free... I've already ditched the software side of things:).
Actually, you hit the nail on the head with that one... wow
:).
The management team played an *extremely* important part as a buffer
between us (the coders) and them (the project management folks on the bank
side). In many development environments, there's simply no way to get any
real work done if you're constantly having to interface with a horde of
other people.
Especially affected by this are the "gurus" on such teams. These guys/gals
really *do* frequently work best in mushroom mode (in the corner, give em
some moisture [coffee/tea/soda] and special light [CRT radiation]), and
that's not possible if they're foced to scurry to and fro for meetings.
Internal team meetings are entirely different, although sometimes lengthy
ones can be bad for that too;).
And now the obligatory response to the uber-troll who's been hounding me
for months: Yep, it's me, in the flesh. You taught me well what it means
to be truly trolled into oblivion, the real meaning of the term "YHBT".
For that, I owe you an immense debt of gratitude. Just FYI, Slashdot
toasted my old login for a couple of weeks as a result of the whole
affair. I probably deserved it, though... I really ought to have heard the
trolling motor whirring away before biting into that tasty hook you set
"way back when". HAND.
"Of COURSE your team will be hurt of you lose a great performer. GE stock used to dip when Jack Welch (former CEO) went on vacation
..."
I couldn't agree with you more on that point, and it's funny you should mention that point... my father used to muse about such stock
funkiness related to chiefs of companies fairly often:). Maybe some day my company will be publicly traded, and the same thing will
happen to us...
Anyhow, back on track here... *Any* project needs highly competent people to maintain the lead, and in reality, this often turns out to
mean just one guy or gal gets that spot. Software development is frequently a thorny, nasty business... people can talk all they want
about "new development models" involing pairing developers off, and I must agree that a larger extension of this model is the basis of
open source development for many projects.
However, you've still gotta have someone there to call the shots, and oftentimes that person is either (1) one of the developers who
started things off to begin with, and can wrap his brain around the entire system, or (2) an especially clueful manager with some serious
tech experience in his/her past. Take Perl for example... love him or hate him, Larry is (in practical terms) the boss. We all know from
the man pages and other fun references that he's a bit on the "quirky" side, but damn good at what he does nonetheless. Would Perl suffer
if Larry fell out of a window? Hell yes, it would. Things would pick up and move forward, but it would be a major loss still.
We have to put our faith in *someone* eventually to move things forward. It's a double-edged sword in real life; sometimes, if you get
rid of the guru, you're freed to make decisions that make a great deal more *business* sense (although it may not be the best thing
technology-wise for the project at hand). Sometimes you get burned; management thinks you should go a different direction, the rest of
the coders can't handle the heat, and the project bombs.
Those are the risks of doing business. As for McDonald's style managment, no thanks... I'm not into franchises;).
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! Oh, and as for the troll that made the comment re: VB, ummm (AC post)... you not only look stupid,
you misinterpreted that sentence. It's only the BOA project that's mostly VB, everything else I've done since has been mostly Perl.
heh.
'is there still room in a company for a quirky 'guru', or are projects so large now by necessity team-based development rules.'
I'm a developer, and always will be. I've worked on projects ranging from simple contact managers to the actual Bank of America telephone banking system (I'm sorry to say, 99% written in VB 6.0) via a company in Atlanta.
Here's a little secret about the BOA project. The core development team is 6 people. Yep, that's right, *six* people to manage a project that allows millions of people to do their banking by phone. Those people are developers; there are three primary guys above them, one dev manager, and two project managers. (Well, one more guy, the VP over that division...)
Now, that kinda puts things in perspective. The "apparent size" of a project in no way guarantees how many dudes it takes to get the job done. Likewise, some "very small" projects end up requiring a whole lot of coders to whip out new releases. It all depends.
Now, about the guru bit... with the BOA project, there's one guy (good friend of mine still) who's the "guru" of that team if you will. He codes VC++ and VB, and is a freakin' maniac at it. The team would be seriously hurt if he up and left (or got hit by a Marta bus) one day. Even so, nobody minds this, because he does a damn fine job.
I think you also have to consider the fact that even in teams with a guru of sorts leading at the helm, most often he/she isn't the uber-asshole elitist coder the media would like us to believe. Sure, he may not get along very well with folks down at the local bar, but he *does* get along with the developers and project people at his job pretty darn well in most cases that I've seen.
Room? Yes, there'll always be room. It all depends on the personality merits of who you've got.
to those on the Gnome side who were gracious enough to be this polite regarding KDE's birthday:). We've all seen a lot of battle damage on both "sides of the fence" when it comes to the desktop wars, and I for one am glad to see (maybe just momentary) a truce.
It kinda makes one wonder, though, how much energy and how many good ideas are wasted by all the lobbing of insults in the general community. This is a fact of life when it comes to closed-source applications apparently, but in the world of open source it's just dumb. Elitism and smugness hinder progress.
Now, if only the database trolls could take a lesson on this one... sometimes the wars between the various open source factions (mySQL, PostgreSQL, etc) can be worse than anything seen between KDE/Gnome (at least in my opinion).
As to what's better, all I can say is that I use *both* Gnome and KDE (well, KDE a bit more than Gnome these days), and *both* mySQL and PostgreSQL personally (more mySQL than the others, blah blah).
It's all progress, folks. Let's keep it that way:).
From this part of the executive summary in the page:
"And anti-spam blacklists, such as the MAPS RBL (Mail Abuse Prevention System Realtime Blackhole List, the most popular), result in a large number of Internet service providers (ISPs) surrepticiously blocking large amounts of non-spam from innocent people [emphasis added by me]. This is because they block all email from entire IP address blocks--even from entire nations. This is done with no notice to the users, who do not even know that their mail is not being delivered."
I seem to recall some cases (can't put my finger on them at the moment) involving ISPs and hosting companies attempting to blackhole the address blocks of their competitors. Needless to say, a very nasty practice indeed. This is part of the reason I've never used the black hole lists.
I know mail filters aren't perfect, but I've always found good ones that worked sufficiently for my purposes. Yes, I know this doesn't reduce the technology threat posed to the infrastructure of the Net by mass spammers, nor does of it reduce the massive losses in bandwidth taken by companies dealing with major spammers on their and connected networks.
Does anyone have any specific case examples of MAPS abuse? I'd be interested to review these myself, if only to be sure I never associate myself (or my company, for that matter) with such orgs in the future. Are there any watchdog groups out there that keep tabs on this sort of thing?
I, for one, think knowing the code to exploit the bug can give admins a good sense of addressing patch priorities.
Agreed, but only if your admin is a competent coder (at least conversant in the language the exploit is written in).
Hell, with MS and a large enterprise network, you'd have to assign a full-time worker just to monitor and install patches.
I hate to say it, but in the current I.T. environment with respect to MS security, this is pretty much a guaranteed cost of doing business if you don't want to be compromised badly and often.
And I'm of the opinion that trusting MS's stance on the 'severity' of a given bug is about as big a security hole as you can have.
Now that I definitely agree with. Severity ratings are great and all, but they can't help you as much as people like to think. Yes, you can try to guage severity based on the environment the OS/app is running is/for, but you can't have a case for every possible permutation. This goes back to needing experienced admins to truly interpret security warnings.
Thank you for the thoughtful post! Note to moderators: give the parent of this comment a look-see... SirSlud's got ye olde thinking cap on:).
"It's high time the security community stopped providing the blueprints for building these weapons..."
How about providing the blueprints to your code, so we can secure the systems you release broken to begin with?
I'm not anti-Microsoft (although I'm getting there, definitely getting there...), I do Windows development also in Visual Studio. I'm near the point of stopping that altogether though. My company is already using Linux for damn near everything (including desktops, not just hosting) anyhow.
This is more than just your average case of idiocy from MS. If I ran a pharmaceutical company, and a drug we produced killed 500 people, do you think the public would accept some excuse like this? "No, really, it's all the fault of the doctors who showed their patients how to take the pills..."
Maybe not a perfect analogy, but equally stupid. When will they learn? Probably when Joe Customer starts realizing how indecent their blame machine really is. Apache isn't perfect, Linux isn't perfect... but we admit this and work toward solutions. Average Joe won't stay completely blind forever; most people aren't stupid (my faith in humanity talking here), and you can't fool anyone indefinitely.
If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of NASA, you may want to check out the pseudo-fictional (historical fiction, real events, mostly real people, some author elaboration) book Space by James A. Meichner. It's a long read, but well worth it.
The article asks where the space program in the States should go next... perhaps a good way to start is to look at the past. Where have we gone seriously wrong, and what have we done right? What can we do better in this century is the real question, I suppose.
To the naysayers, I'm (1) not plugging this book for profit, (2) not associated with Amazon.com, (3) a definite literature geek. You may not like it, but at least give it a shot:).
Now here's something useful for a change... just imagine the potential this thing has to change your dating life.
Let's set the scene: You're at the park with your new girl, watching the moon rise over the horizon, and things start gettin' a bit steamy. You're past first base, rounding second, and sure you're gonna get to slide into home.
Only trouble is, you misread the situation, and your girl decides you've had enough for the time being. What's a guy to do?
No worries, mate... you've got that watch! Unbeknowst to her, you were snapping photos faster than a Microsoft web server being compromised. Later that night, you kick back at the PC, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
As part of our ongoing effort to reduce junk emails to our loyal customers, the Microsoft abuse management team has created a new "real-time black hole" domain block list. This list is used to check all mail routed through our servers (increased in volume thanks to our new deal with Qwest) for known spammer domain names.
You may be interested to note that leading this list are the following notorious domains. These sites should be avoided for the protection of our revenue stream... errr... customers:
Netscape.com
Redhat.com
Linux.org
Sun.com
Apple.com
Slashdot.org
Additionally, our upcoming Microsoft World Browser will include protection against websites hosted at these domains. Thank you for your cooperation as we work to improve your user experience on the web.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for the reply! I definitely see where you're coming from on this topic, and think that all cases of abuse at the hands of a financial institution (or pseudo-institution, as the case may sometimes be) deserves close scrutiny.
However, the situation is always more complex than that. For example, a couple of quick minutes on Google yielded the following unto mine Konqueror:
Basically, pick any financial institution or payment processing company "X" and search for a hate site associated with it. You're almost certain to "win" each time. Now, I'm not saying that these companies are blameless by any stretch of the imagination. Case in point, I actually got messed over by Bank of America while I was working on the development team that wrote their telephone banking system software. Needless to say, I got the errors corrected rather quickly.
The problem is simple: any company doing business of any sort will come up against opposition, disgruntled customers, angry stockholders, etc. It's oftentimes difficult to weed out the "fact from fiction" in a lot of cases involving complex issues. I don't think there's a major national bank in existence that hasn't dealt with a major class-action lawsuit over policy issues.
That's where the trick comes in. These days, almost all institutions, from banks to brokerage houses, have strict and specific verbiage allowing them to "hang on to your cash" in the case of a perceived conflict. PayPal isn't even close to the worst I've seen of that sort of practice.
I suppose it really does come down to individual experience (and group communication of experience, very valuable). As for the sites that report on the misdeeds of these organizations, I say rock on. But, we've got to balance everything out. Frankly, PayPal has taken a heck of a lot less heat than is typical of a "newcomer" in the field, especially given the unsteady ground they started out to build their revenue stream on initially.
I attribute their success to good management. That doesn't mean they'll always have the benefit of intelligent people at the top, but as long as that's reasonably enough the case, I'm okay with them.
On the other hand, if they burned me badly I'd probably be first in line to register "GodIHateThoseScrewyBastards.com" too. It's just human nature to attempt to right wrongs, and I could even be in the wrong in that case without knowing it... almost makes my brain hurt trying to wrap the grey matter around that part.
Thank you again for the thoughtful reply!
I normally try not to be overly critical of most people I run into online (at least not in a bitchy way, moderators included), but I've got to agree with you on your stance concerning Michael's apparent delusional expectations of total privacy in the area of online transactions.
As a case in point, I'd like to mention that I know several folks personally who run small to mid-size online businesses. The majority of these people have access to (and use) "true" merchant account processing systems, some online and some offline (via batch at the end of the day). Even so, again and again I hear the same general sentiment when it comes to PayPal:
"When I have doubts about the nature of a large transaction or have concerns over fraud, I use PayPal in lieu of ordinary merchant channels."
To all who might support Michael's (seemingly ill-informed) stance on the issue, note that that's not me speaking, it's a LOT of people I talk to routinely. PayPal has built a reputation on taking exceptional care to prevent online fraud, through a variety of verification mechanisms. Not only that, those mechanisms are easily configured through the browser by accountholders. You can make fraud passing through you account as easy or difficult as you want, depending on your needs and the relationship with your customers.
Thank you, Accipiter. Micheal, please research this stuff more before you go off on one-line rants. Of course, you could always talk to the folks over at ThinkGeek; I'm certain they would be happy to impart their experience in transactions processing to you (I mean this in all seriousness, education really is a Good Thing).
I've never really had anything but a good experience with PayPal (and I've used it *heavily* for two years now). Maybe it's just my good fortune.
Well, okay, I do have one small gripe. Apparently, their site cannot be convinced that a certain customer of ours is browsing from the U.K., and as a result he's having to send us a check (brits read: cheque
Hopefully their money market fund will see a bit of a recovery soon (1.9% == blegh), but hey, there's a whole slew of investment vehicles that aren't doing so well at the moment. Such is the state of the economy.
As for "overly tight fraud prevention measures", I'd like to hear from people who've simultaneously run a company basing his/her online transactions on "true" merchant account methods. Most e-based merchant account providers/processors don't place nearly the emphasis on security that PayPal does, and chargebacks are a real bitch (not to mention quite bad for P.R. if the customer who got ripped off is particularly angry about it).
Just my brief experience in these matters. Replies are very welcome!
This note relates to the
I suppose that as long as the detectors maintain something above the minimum radiation traversal distance (I believe quoted in that thread as ~24 meters, don't know about the validity of that number), but within some outer bound distance limit, all should be well with the detection project.
Now, from grokking what I could from the PDF documents available at the primary project site, I believe the detectors are arranged in a "straw man" type formation specifically for the purpose of getting the most area out of the 1km^3 volume of ice. This would probably allow for some variance in the specific arrangement of the detectors (again, if this were monitored as I assume it will be).
God, I need to get back to work. This staying up for three days business can't last forever. Coffee is my friend...
seletz, upon further research into your point, I happened across this document on the UCSC site. It discusses the "slippage" behavior of the West Antarctic ice sheet in particular. I'm not certain what region specifically the proposed neutrino study site lies in (hopefully the Eastern sheet???), but this definitely lends weight to your inquiry into the changing nature of the ice.
Here's an excerpt concerning this region:
"The ice streams can be seen in satellite images as large features within the ice sheet about 500 kilometers (300 miles) long and 20 to 100 kilometers (10 to 60 miles) wide. They move at a rate of 1 to 2 meters per day, sliding over a bed of sediment saturated with liquid water. But if the bed becomes cold enough for the water in it to start freezing, the loss of lubrication causes the ice stream to slow and eventually stop moving, Tulaczyk said."
Now, that is definitely some significant movement in the ice sheet. One can only presume that the researchers on this project have very carefully chosen the coordinates for the "telescope" placement to avoid this kind of nasty possibility. However, even the general settling and compacting of ice layers will inevitably produce some movement, even in an area limited to 1^3K.
As per my earlier reply, I guess that close monitoring of and allowances for such shifts have been incorporated into the project design specifications. At least, for $15M USD I'd certainly hope so!
It remains to be seen, however, if our species can manage to mess up the climate in the chosen region enough over 10 years to irreparably skew the results...
Hmm... this is gonna give me brain strain...
Borrowing from the PDF doc found at: this location on the public docs site, here's what I could grep out:
(from page 2, par 2): "... We show that this limit is accessible by operating a kilometer-scale neutrino observatory over several years."
(from page 2, par 3): "... Although the flux from a single source may still be small, this conclusion is credible because a neutrino telescope will be operated for a decade."
Basically, I think the intrinsic accuracy in the system lies largely in the fact that it will be operated for a long duration. This temporal note affects multiple portions of the problem, acting as an averaging and error-correction mechanism (at least as far as I can tell).
So, given enough data (ala' Seti@Home), it should be possible to pay attention to the general outstanding trends produced from analysis, even given somewhat of a shift or "settling/sliding" in ice conditions.
Please forgive me awful German; I tried to grok the site you pointed me at, but it just made my brain hurt
Hmm... very good question indeed. This page shows the major tectonic plates involved.
It seems to me that they've got a fairly wide berth in area (given the relatively small size of the selected region for usage) for the purposes of the project. Apparently, the vast majority of Antarctica is comprised on a single major plate.
To the best of my knowledge (albeit limited), the greater portion of this region is relatively seismically stable as a result. Of course, they'd want to stay away from "boundary regions".
That's about all I've got. Anyone got more firm data on this?
particles physics was so damn cool...
Sorry, it's 05:50 EST, and I'm still up coding... hey, Antartica's got lots of penguins, eh?
I'll stop while I'm ahead
matt-fu, you are absolutely correct
In all seriousness, upon further consideration of my (parent) post, a certain quote comes to mind:
"There are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks."
I seem to recall this being most true of filesystems and databases. Hell, I've got a couple of decent PIII machines not doing much, time to have some fun (perhaps later on, buy new hard drives after my "tests" cause platter issues...).
Thank you for the reply!
Geez, are the moderators in a bad mood tonight? Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna lose some karma for this one (not to worry, stuck at 50
I think humour is a large part of what keeps
Of course, this could just be inter-geek jealousy over the fact that seann has a girlfriend
Anybody have any real-world benchmarks we can have a look at? I hate to sound redundant on this, but performance is a big issue for web/file servers (which is mostly what I'm running these days).
If the "running the hell out of it" scenarios look good, I'll probably give it a shot on a production box. Actually, knowing me, I'll give it a shot anyhow, but hey...
Just as a thought, I'm operating from a starting assumption that it's *pretty much* just ext2 with journaling, but it's the overhead for the journaling that raises my eyebrows just a tad...
Thanks for the feedback!
Quoting from "Don't Drink the Water":
"'Cause you're all dead now
I live with my justice
I live with my greedy need
I live with no mercy
I live with my frenzied feeding
I live with my hatred
I live with my jealousy
I live with the notion
That I don't need anyone but me
Don't drink the water
There's blood in the water
"
Interpret as you see fit. Sorry 'bout the copyright infringement, Dave.
"I mean, VA has no reason to support Slashdot, Sourceforge, Themes.org, and other very expensive sites that produce zero revenue."
Hmm... not too sure about this one. I haven't looked at the financials for these sites/the business units that run them (and the ad market is admittedly in sad shape these days), but I would hesitate to say they bring in zero revenue. This is probably least true of Slashdot and ThinkGeek.
"Our biggest cheerleader has switched sides on us and we are going to be in serious trouble."
I really don't see how the name change says they're "switching side on us"; you're right that they've done some shady stuff related to their opening day, but this goes a bit overboard. It's not like they're completely dropping anything and everything to do with Linux to run off and write software for Windows XP only.
"VB programmers are a dime a dozen and can be hired for $30k a year, so why would a software company want to hire anyone else?"
I don't know any decent VB programmers (and there are those who can do amazing stuff with the language... I happen to have done extensive VB work in my time) who would be willing to work for $30K a year. Any manager hiring such a person has to know s/he's setting him/herself up for a disaster.
When you're talking about software development, it's the developers that determine the expense these days (as opposed to the environment). Your statement may have been true 5 years ago, but not anymore. It all depends on what your developers are most comfortable with using.
How about the thousands of web hosting companies out there that use Linux in all its varied distros?
How about software companies that are beginning (and some that have been for some time) to offer *nix software development services?
How about the embedded folks and various appliance devices that use variants on Linux?
I don't think Linux will be vanishing anytime soon if one company bites the dust. Just because the (literally) thousands of companies out there supporting Linux aren't necessarily "household names" doesn't mean they don't have significant impact.
At first glance, your post seemed to smell of troll... upon further consideration, it just seems dumb. Sorry to be harsh.
I can recall LOTS of cases where I've seen kiosks for other game consoles "down and out" so to speak. It's a pretty common occurence, really.
You have to think about the fact that these units sometimes have to put up with a lot of abuse when on public display. Yes, they're oftentimes enclosed in plexiglass and such, but that's not total protection.
On the other hand, I do know that these boxes run a good deal hotter than your average console, owing to increased "power". Taking that into account, a nice tight protective enclosure might not be such a great idea (I wouldn't try sealing my box up in a tight space and running it 24x7 either).
Of course, on the *really* personal opinion side of this, I think Microsoft has probably goofed when it comes to designing this thing to really last. It's overjuiced in my opinion, runs entirely too hot (and might be too fragile too) for constant use and bumping "by the kids" (hey, I'm a big kid, all that about more expensive toys, yada yada yada).
Man, just when I thought my little bubble world could be Microsoft free... I've already ditched the software side of things
Just some thoughts, nothing more.
Actually, you hit the nail on the head with that one... wow
:).
The management team played an *extremely* important part as a buffer
between us (the coders) and them (the project management folks on the bank
side). In many development environments, there's simply no way to get any
real work done if you're constantly having to interface with a horde of
other people.
Especially affected by this are the "gurus" on such teams. These guys/gals
really *do* frequently work best in mushroom mode (in the corner, give em
some moisture [coffee/tea/soda] and special light [CRT radiation]), and
that's not possible if they're foced to scurry to and fro for meetings.
Internal team meetings are entirely different, although sometimes lengthy
ones can be bad for that too
And now the obligatory response to the uber-troll who's been hounding me
for months: Yep, it's me, in the flesh. You taught me well what it means
to be truly trolled into oblivion, the real meaning of the term "YHBT".
For that, I owe you an immense debt of gratitude. Just FYI, Slashdot
toasted my old login for a couple of weeks as a result of the whole
affair. I probably deserved it, though... I really ought to have heard the
trolling motor whirring away before biting into that tasty hook you set
"way back when". HAND.
Your response, slaytanic
:). Maybe some day my company will be publicly traded, and the same thing will
;).
In response:
"Of COURSE your team will be hurt of you lose a great performer. GE stock used to dip when Jack Welch (former CEO) went on vacation
..."
I couldn't agree with you more on that point, and it's funny you should mention that point... my father used to muse about such stock
funkiness related to chiefs of companies fairly often
happen to us...
Anyhow, back on track here... *Any* project needs highly competent people to maintain the lead, and in reality, this often turns out to
mean just one guy or gal gets that spot. Software development is frequently a thorny, nasty business... people can talk all they want
about "new development models" involing pairing developers off, and I must agree that a larger extension of this model is the basis of
open source development for many projects.
However, you've still gotta have someone there to call the shots, and oftentimes that person is either (1) one of the developers who
started things off to begin with, and can wrap his brain around the entire system, or (2) an especially clueful manager with some serious
tech experience in his/her past. Take Perl for example... love him or hate him, Larry is (in practical terms) the boss. We all know from
the man pages and other fun references that he's a bit on the "quirky" side, but damn good at what he does nonetheless. Would Perl suffer
if Larry fell out of a window? Hell yes, it would. Things would pick up and move forward, but it would be a major loss still.
We have to put our faith in *someone* eventually to move things forward. It's a double-edged sword in real life; sometimes, if you get
rid of the guru, you're freed to make decisions that make a great deal more *business* sense (although it may not be the best thing
technology-wise for the project at hand). Sometimes you get burned; management thinks you should go a different direction, the rest of
the coders can't handle the heat, and the project bombs.
Those are the risks of doing business. As for McDonald's style managment, no thanks... I'm not into franchises
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! Oh, and as for the troll that made the comment re: VB, ummm (AC post)... you not only look stupid,
you misinterpreted that sentence. It's only the BOA project that's mostly VB, everything else I've done since has been mostly Perl.
heh.
The question posed is *really* overly broad:
'is there still room in a company for a quirky 'guru', or are projects so large now by necessity team-based development rules.'
I'm a developer, and always will be. I've worked on projects ranging from simple contact managers to the actual Bank of America telephone banking system (I'm sorry to say, 99% written in VB 6.0) via a company in Atlanta.
Here's a little secret about the BOA project. The core development team is 6 people. Yep, that's right, *six* people to manage a project that allows millions of people to do their banking by phone. Those people are developers; there are three primary guys above them, one dev manager, and two project managers. (Well, one more guy, the VP over that division...)
Now, that kinda puts things in perspective. The "apparent size" of a project in no way guarantees how many dudes it takes to get the job done. Likewise, some "very small" projects end up requiring a whole lot of coders to whip out new releases. It all depends.
Now, about the guru bit... with the BOA project, there's one guy (good friend of mine still) who's the "guru" of that team if you will. He codes VC++ and VB, and is a freakin' maniac at it. The team would be seriously hurt if he up and left (or got hit by a Marta bus) one day. Even so, nobody minds this, because he does a damn fine job.
I think you also have to consider the fact that even in teams with a guru of sorts leading at the helm, most often he/she isn't the uber-asshole elitist coder the media would like us to believe. Sure, he may not get along very well with folks down at the local bar, but he *does* get along with the developers and project people at his job pretty darn well in most cases that I've seen.
Room? Yes, there'll always be room. It all depends on the personality merits of who you've got.
to those on the Gnome side who were gracious enough to be this polite regarding KDE's birthday
It kinda makes one wonder, though, how much energy and how many good ideas are wasted by all the lobbing of insults in the general community. This is a fact of life when it comes to closed-source applications apparently, but in the world of open source it's just dumb. Elitism and smugness hinder progress.
Now, if only the database trolls could take a lesson on this one... sometimes the wars between the various open source factions (mySQL, PostgreSQL, etc) can be worse than anything seen between KDE/Gnome (at least in my opinion).
As to what's better, all I can say is that I use *both* Gnome and KDE (well, KDE a bit more than Gnome these days), and *both* mySQL and PostgreSQL personally (more mySQL than the others, blah blah).
It's all progress, folks. Let's keep it that way
From this part of the executive summary in the page:
"And anti-spam blacklists, such as the MAPS RBL (Mail Abuse Prevention System Realtime Blackhole List, the most popular), result in a large number of Internet service providers (ISPs) surrepticiously blocking large amounts of non-spam from innocent people [emphasis added by me]. This is because they block all email from entire IP address blocks--even from entire nations. This is done with no notice to the users, who do not even know that their mail is not being delivered."
I seem to recall some cases (can't put my finger on them at the moment) involving ISPs and hosting companies attempting to blackhole the address blocks of their competitors. Needless to say, a very nasty practice indeed. This is part of the reason I've never used the black hole lists.
I know mail filters aren't perfect, but I've always found good ones that worked sufficiently for my purposes. Yes, I know this doesn't reduce the technology threat posed to the infrastructure of the Net by mass spammers, nor does of it reduce the massive losses in bandwidth taken by companies dealing with major spammers on their and connected networks.
Does anyone have any specific case examples of MAPS abuse? I'd be interested to review these myself, if only to be sure I never associate myself (or my company, for that matter) with such orgs in the future. Are there any watchdog groups out there that keep tabs on this sort of thing?
I, for one, think knowing the code to exploit the bug can give admins a good sense of addressing patch priorities.
Agreed, but only if your admin is a competent coder (at least conversant in the language the exploit is written in).
Hell, with MS and a large enterprise network, you'd have to assign a full-time worker just to monitor and install patches.
I hate to say it, but in the current I.T. environment with respect to MS security, this is pretty much a guaranteed cost of doing business if you don't want to be compromised badly and often.
And I'm of the opinion that trusting MS's stance on the 'severity' of a given bug is about as big a security hole as you can have.
Now that I definitely agree with. Severity ratings are great and all, but they can't help you as much as people like to think. Yes, you can try to guage severity based on the environment the OS/app is running is/for, but you can't have a case for every possible permutation. This goes back to needing experienced admins to truly interpret security warnings.
Thank you for the thoughtful post! Note to moderators: give the parent of this comment a look-see... SirSlud's got ye olde thinking cap on
here we go:
"It's high time the security community stopped providing the blueprints for building these weapons..."
How about providing the blueprints to your code, so we can secure the systems you release broken to begin with?
I'm not anti-Microsoft (although I'm getting there, definitely getting there...), I do Windows development also in Visual Studio. I'm near the point of stopping that altogether though. My company is already using Linux for damn near everything (including desktops, not just hosting) anyhow.
This is more than just your average case of idiocy from MS. If I ran a pharmaceutical company, and a drug we produced killed 500 people, do you think the public would accept some excuse like this? "No, really, it's all the fault of the doctors who showed their patients how to take the pills..."
Maybe not a perfect analogy, but equally stupid. When will they learn? Probably when Joe Customer starts realizing how indecent their blame machine really is. Apache isn't perfect, Linux isn't perfect... but we admit this and work toward solutions. Average Joe won't stay completely blind forever; most people aren't stupid (my faith in humanity talking here), and you can't fool anyone indefinitely.
Damn, and I was cutting down on my smoking...
If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of NASA, you may want to check out the pseudo-fictional (historical fiction, real events, mostly real people, some author elaboration) book Space by James A. Meichner. It's a long read, but well worth it.
The article asks where the space program in the States should go next... perhaps a good way to start is to look at the past. Where have we gone seriously wrong, and what have we done right? What can we do better in this century is the real question, I suppose.
To the naysayers, I'm (1) not plugging this book for profit, (2) not associated with Amazon.com, (3) a definite literature geek. You may not like it, but at least give it a shot
Now here's something useful for a change... just imagine the potential this thing has to change your dating life.
Let's set the scene: You're at the park with your new girl, watching the moon rise over the horizon, and things start gettin' a bit steamy. You're past first base, rounding second, and sure you're gonna get to slide into home.
Only trouble is, you misread the situation, and your girl decides you've had enough for the time being. What's a guy to do?
No worries, mate... you've got that watch! Unbeknowst to her, you were snapping photos faster than a Microsoft web server being compromised. Later that night, you kick back at the PC, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Yep, it's useful all right...
As part of our ongoing effort to reduce junk emails to our loyal customers, the Microsoft abuse management team has created a new "real-time black hole" domain block list. This list is used to check all mail routed through our servers (increased in volume thanks to our new deal with Qwest) for known spammer domain names.
You may be interested to note that leading this list are the following notorious domains. These sites should be avoided for the protection of our revenue stream... errr... customers:
Additionally, our upcoming Microsoft World Browser will include protection against websites hosted at these domains. Thank you for your cooperation as we work to improve your user experience on the web.
Sincerely,
Microsoft Support