The problem I have is that the people that belong to the climate change cult refuse to explore the possibility that, some, all, or even most of the present climate change could be caused by factors other than C02 emissions. Increased solar activity, methane production from livestock, and cyclical long-term climate change may all have something to do with the current climate change, but the majority of environmentalists refuse to discuss anything but CO2 emissions. In addition, I find it very worrisome that Al Gore, arguably one of the most notable individuals in the global warming movement, is so heavily involved in carbon trading. There really isn't much doubt that climate change is occurring, the question is why.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 1
I would agree, they definitely aren't mutually exclusive. Happy, well paid workers are almost always better for a company's bottom line than the alternative.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
If a company goes bankrupt because it doesn't let people go when it is necessary so that it can provide them a "steady income", is their income still steady when the doors close?
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
The purpose of a company isn't to provide a steady living for people, but to maximize profits.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
For a company to survive it is sometimes necessary to make decisions that aren't beneficial to some people in the company. Being able to make these decisions rationally without being unnecessarily swayed by emotion is the trait that is favored.
You call it redundant security, I call it layered. For example, between most of my servers and the public internet, there are at least three firewalls, generally edge, zone, and host. In the past I've found individual firewalls in the stack that were misconfigured and would have let through traffic that they shouldn't, had there not been two other layers to enforce policy. Additionally, I've seen firewall layers fail to firewall traffic completely, for whatever reason. Had there not been layered security, it's quite possible that a system could have been compromised.
Computer security isn't really like 9/11 in the sense that there really are actual, plausible, real, consistent, constant, determined threats. Put a clean install of XP online without patching with a public IP and no firewall, and see how long it takes to be compromised. In an environment that is absolutely hostile, no doubt about that, layered security is the way to go if for no other reason than the attacker has to break into multiple systems to get what they are really after. This gives me (and my IDS) multiple chances to figure out something isn't right and fix it, and makes the attack take much longer. Additionally, if there are much easier targets, they probably won't pick me. You can still steal the car with the club on it almost as easily as any other, but it isn't really worth the extra effort if there is a car without the club sitting right next to it, plus you look a lot more suspicious when you're sawing through the steering wheel.
I'd imagine that it would be trivial to build in an automatic system like the monorails at Disney World have. If they train is going too fast over a section of track, or is too close to another train, the computer kills power to the train, letting it glide to a stop. Only once it has stopped completely can it be manually restarted.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I suppose you advocate the agency allowing the spectrum to be wasted indefinitely while there is a solution that can free the bandwidth for other uses. It isn't as if the proceeds of this, in part, aren't being used to subsidize the cost of OTA digital to analog converters for those affected. It would appear that you really don't know what you are talking about, perhaps the tinfoil hat is on too tight.
Except that espionage is worthless if the enemy is suspicious that you are engaged in it. For it to be effective the enemy has to believe you can't hear what they are saying, otherwise they'll just feed you false information. This theory is, at best, flawed. I think the smart money is on Islamic Isolationists.
If the scheduler was pluggable this wouldn't even be a question. As it stands, nothing would stop a distribution such as Ubuntu from shipping a modified kernel with a customized scheduler if they wanted to, it isn't as if they don't ship their own kernel versions now.
"Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves, because in the final analysis, only Man can evaluate the Moon in terms understandable to other men."
The reason vista gets harped on so much is because it's a dog. I reinstalled XP a couple of days ago, because I had finally had enough of Vista after almost three months of usage. Before I reinstalled, I had disabled UAC and Aero to increase the responsiveness. The only feature I really liked was the searchable start menu, so I installed Launchy on XP and I couldn't be happier. When I type a command in launchy, the results are instantaneous, no Vista lag. Running XP with the same applications, at idle I am using under 2% CPU and about 700MB of memory. With Vista, my CPU usage was pretty steady at 20-30% with memory usage of about 1.4GB for the same load and software.
Before I reinstalled XP, I installed Ubuntu to try to run Linux on the desktop again. After I got my video cards and monitors working, and finally got Compiz to function properly, I was quite impressed by the performance. Even with the effects enabled, the system was functional and responsive under load. I suspect this can be attributed to a properly designed kernel. Additionally, the Ubuntu people get a lot right, like the installation procedure (done from the Live CD, I browsed the internet while it installed), non-free driver installation and package management. Multiple monitor support was a total PITA to set up, but worked as I would have expected once configured. Unfortunately, Compiz doesn't work properly with xinerama so I reluctantly switched back to XP.
Vista isn't like the early days of XP at all. I switched to XP before SP1 from 2k, and while the performance was slightly lower, I thought that the additional application compatibility was worth it. In other words, where XP ran the software I was used to using on 95 and 98 better than 2k, Vista doesn't seem to run anything better than XP. Indeed, at this point I think it would be considerably easier to transition to Ubuntu than to Vista, so long as the majority of the desktop applications you use regularly are free software, and you don't have a nonstandard (more than 1 graphics card) monitor configuration.
Yes, but if you were cutting cables for the purpose of espionage, would you really want to cut this many cables at once? When you have it reported all over the place and even the armchair quarterbacks everywhere are betting on espionage, its got to look rather suspicious.
It would seem to me that there are much easier ways to knock a line out for a few minutes than cutting a cable with a ships anchor, like paying a janitor to "accidently" hit the big red button, spying to determine scheduled maintenance periods, installing an operative to purposely disrupt endpoint comms, etc... Those things are known to happen, and it's a hell of a lot less obvious than multiple erratic cuts with ships anchors. The only way this would make sense from an espionage perspective is if somebody is cutting lines with the intention of getting caught. In other words, we know the russians have a tap on line A, so we cut lines A, B, C, D, and E. Foreign government says, hey, this is no coincidence, and checks all five lines, discovering tap. Tap is removed.
More realistically, if this were intentional I'd suspect it was a fringe middle eastern group trying to keep out western influences. That makes a lot more sense since presumably the countries that have the resources to tap undersea cables also have the wherewithal to do it without getting caught.
I'd argue that a good hardware design (digital logic, verilog, gate construction, basic circuit design) course and an assembly language course would be invaluable to the modern computer science major.
I am aware that Linux has excellent software raid support, I use it on all my servers. But Windows doesn't, so if I want to dual boot I need Windows and Linux to share a nvraid array.
I actually have thought a lot about what life was like for my grandparents, and more importantly, asked them about it. My grandfather was born just after WWI, lived through the great depression, then fought in WWII. Having lived through that, the Korean war, the cold war, Vietnam, the Kennedy Assassination, the space program, the civil rights movement, the fall of the soviet union, and 9/11, I always believed that he lived through perhaps the most interesting time in history, and almost certainly saw the greatest change in everyday life of perhaps any generation. He once told me that when he was a child he remembers not having a telephone, electricity, a car, a refrigerator, or even a radio (they were quite poor during the depression). I still remember, a few years ago, showing him how to connect to the internet and search it with Google, and telling him he could find pretty much anything he ever wanted to look up with it.
I seriously doubt that in my lifetime I will see anywhere near the amount of revolutionary change that he saw in his.
That's good to hear. I haven't tried in a little over a year, but this is definitely a big deal to me, as previously this configuration was most definitely non-trivial.
I would switch to Linux today if I could install on the NVRaid array I use for windows, and configure tri-monitor support using two different graphics cards running three different resolutions in under 3 or 4 hours. The problem I have with trying to use Linux on the desktop is that doing fairly ordinary things requires a substantial time investment, like, for instance, installing a wireless card.
I'm currently running Vista, and I have to disagree with you. It is definitely a resource pig. To get acceptable performance at this point I have disabled Aero and the majority of the other new services. While I like the searchable start menu and find it a very welcome addition, it is the only welcome addition that I have found. Does anyone know of software for XP that will duplicate this functionality?
Vista itself is incredibly frustrating. I disabled UAC after a couple of weeks because the constant warnings were driving me up a wall. There are a whole host of other issues though. For instance, sometimes when trying to remove files that I own, I'll get permission denied errors. I'm not talking about system files, or even files in use. I'm talking about data files that are in my Users directory, where I am listed as the owner. The only way I have found to remove these files is by removing them after a reboot. Additionally, there is still quite a bit of software that I have issues installing or using with Vista. Maple and some Eclipse functionality come to mind. It seems that whenever I set out to complete a task using Vista, I have to fight with the operating system and find workarounds every step of the way.
I've found the Vista experience to be an exercise in frustration, and I eagerly await switching back to XP. I hate it passionately, at this point more than I hate reinstalling.
That's the biggest problem that I see with PC gaming. Last week, I went out and bought a Nvidia 8800 GTS for $300, so that I could play some of the more recent PC games at an acceptable frame rate at my primary monitor's native resolutions (1680x1050). My computer is fairly modern, with a 2.66 GHZ dual core processor and 2 GB of DDR2 800. The problem is, even with this upgrade, I could only play Crysis at medium settings.
While it was definitely a performance improvement over my 6800 sli setup, the quality just wasn't there for the price. For another $100, I can get a PS3 that includes a Bluray player and I won't need to worry about tweaking settings and overclocking to get acceptable framerates. Granted, I could probably match the performance of my 360 or the PS3 if I upgraded my processor along with the graphics card, but if I were to do that, I'd be looking at a considerably more expensive upgrade. It just doesn't seem worth it any more.
If someone could hack this baby to be a media head unit it would absolutely own That is a very interesting idea. If I could get a HD-DVD player that was capable of running software equivalent to Xbox Media Center with the horsepower to play HD media, I would go buy one today. Why has no other company developed a box that can duplicate the functionality of that piece of software?
Given that the huge number of consoles sold can have a large impact on which format wins, I wonder if the companies backing a particular format in the future would find it advantageous to subsidize the cost of the drive to a console manufacturer given that they don't really have that much to gain. In other words, I suspect that had Toshiba offered some serious financial incentive to Microsoft to include the drives in the 360, HD-DVD would now be the predominant format.
On the other hand, having the winning high def format drive has to be advantageous to Sony at this point, and makes the PS3 price seem not as unattractive as it once was. I know when I originally bought a PS2 I only really wanted to play GTA3, but I was able to justify the price to myself because, at the time, I didn't have a DVD player and it was a fairly inexpensive DVD player as well. I will probably eventually pick up a PS3 for the same reason.
I suspect the reason that the sun computing service hasn't taken off is because it doesn't have the ease of use of the Amazon services, which do roughly the same thing and have done pretty well. I can't speak for EC2, but I have used S3 enough to understand that it's dead easy, and I will be using EC2 in the future when I have the need.
I've noticed this with some of my code. I was paging through the source of an application that I've been using internally for about 10 years now the other day, and I noticed that a good portion of the code base dealt with error handling and bug workarounds that were never present in the original release, but were slowly integrated in as problems crept up over the years, things like leap year bugs that you wouldn't necessarily test for. While I noticed all of that code and all of the different error messages possible, I mentally noted that I can't recall the last time I had actually seen the application throw an error message. As the code aged its stability and ability to negotiate edge cases seems to have gone up substantially, to the point that it hardly ever needs maintenance today.
Some of the code is a bit sloppy and could be refactored, but why would I want to risk introducing new bugs into an application that operates more or less bug free today.
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The problem I have is that the people that belong to the climate change cult refuse to explore the possibility that, some, all, or even most of the present climate change could be caused by factors other than C02 emissions. Increased solar activity, methane production from livestock, and cyclical long-term climate change may all have something to do with the current climate change, but the majority of environmentalists refuse to discuss anything but CO2 emissions. In addition, I find it very worrisome that Al Gore, arguably one of the most notable individuals in the global warming movement, is so heavily involved in carbon trading. There really isn't much doubt that climate change is occurring, the question is why.
I would agree, they definitely aren't mutually exclusive. Happy, well paid workers are almost always better for a company's bottom line than the alternative.
If a company goes bankrupt because it doesn't let people go when it is necessary so that it can provide them a "steady income", is their income still steady when the doors close?
The purpose of a company isn't to provide a steady living for people, but to maximize profits.
For a company to survive it is sometimes necessary to make decisions that aren't beneficial to some people in the company. Being able to make these decisions rationally without being unnecessarily swayed by emotion is the trait that is favored.
Managing one system is a lot different than managing 100 or more systems.
You call it redundant security, I call it layered. For example, between most of my servers and the public internet, there are at least three firewalls, generally edge, zone, and host. In the past I've found individual firewalls in the stack that were misconfigured and would have let through traffic that they shouldn't, had there not been two other layers to enforce policy. Additionally, I've seen firewall layers fail to firewall traffic completely, for whatever reason. Had there not been layered security, it's quite possible that a system could have been compromised.
Computer security isn't really like 9/11 in the sense that there really are actual, plausible, real, consistent, constant, determined threats. Put a clean install of XP online without patching with a public IP and no firewall, and see how long it takes to be compromised. In an environment that is absolutely hostile, no doubt about that, layered security is the way to go if for no other reason than the attacker has to break into multiple systems to get what they are really after. This gives me (and my IDS) multiple chances to figure out something isn't right and fix it, and makes the attack take much longer. Additionally, if there are much easier targets, they probably won't pick me. You can still steal the car with the club on it almost as easily as any other, but it isn't really worth the extra effort if there is a car without the club sitting right next to it, plus you look a lot more suspicious when you're sawing through the steering wheel.
I'd imagine that it would be trivial to build in an automatic system like the monorails at Disney World have. If they train is going too fast over a section of track, or is too close to another train, the computer kills power to the train, letting it glide to a stop. Only once it has stopped completely can it be manually restarted.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I suppose you advocate the agency allowing the spectrum to be wasted indefinitely while there is a solution that can free the bandwidth for other uses. It isn't as if the proceeds of this, in part, aren't being used to subsidize the cost of OTA digital to analog converters for those affected. It would appear that you really don't know what you are talking about, perhaps the tinfoil hat is on too tight.
Except that espionage is worthless if the enemy is suspicious that you are engaged in it. For it to be effective the enemy has to believe you can't hear what they are saying, otherwise they'll just feed you false information. This theory is, at best, flawed. I think the smart money is on Islamic Isolationists.
If the scheduler was pluggable this wouldn't even be a question. As it stands, nothing would stop a distribution such as Ubuntu from shipping a modified kernel with a customized scheduler if they wanted to, it isn't as if they don't ship their own kernel versions now.
"Our God-given curiosity will force us to go there ourselves, because in the final analysis, only Man can evaluate the Moon in terms understandable to other men."
Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom
The reason vista gets harped on so much is because it's a dog. I reinstalled XP a couple of days ago, because I had finally had enough of Vista after almost three months of usage. Before I reinstalled, I had disabled UAC and Aero to increase the responsiveness. The only feature I really liked was the searchable start menu, so I installed Launchy on XP and I couldn't be happier. When I type a command in launchy, the results are instantaneous, no Vista lag. Running XP with the same applications, at idle I am using under 2% CPU and about 700MB of memory. With Vista, my CPU usage was pretty steady at 20-30% with memory usage of about 1.4GB for the same load and software.
Before I reinstalled XP, I installed Ubuntu to try to run Linux on the desktop again. After I got my video cards and monitors working, and finally got Compiz to function properly, I was quite impressed by the performance. Even with the effects enabled, the system was functional and responsive under load. I suspect this can be attributed to a properly designed kernel. Additionally, the Ubuntu people get a lot right, like the installation procedure (done from the Live CD, I browsed the internet while it installed), non-free driver installation and package management. Multiple monitor support was a total PITA to set up, but worked as I would have expected once configured. Unfortunately, Compiz doesn't work properly with xinerama so I reluctantly switched back to XP.
Vista isn't like the early days of XP at all. I switched to XP before SP1 from 2k, and while the performance was slightly lower, I thought that the additional application compatibility was worth it. In other words, where XP ran the software I was used to using on 95 and 98 better than 2k, Vista doesn't seem to run anything better than XP. Indeed, at this point I think it would be considerably easier to transition to Ubuntu than to Vista, so long as the majority of the desktop applications you use regularly are free software, and you don't have a nonstandard (more than 1 graphics card) monitor configuration.
Yes, but if you were cutting cables for the purpose of espionage, would you really want to cut this many cables at once? When you have it reported all over the place and even the armchair quarterbacks everywhere are betting on espionage, its got to look rather suspicious.
It would seem to me that there are much easier ways to knock a line out for a few minutes than cutting a cable with a ships anchor, like paying a janitor to "accidently" hit the big red button, spying to determine scheduled maintenance periods, installing an operative to purposely disrupt endpoint comms, etc... Those things are known to happen, and it's a hell of a lot less obvious than multiple erratic cuts with ships anchors. The only way this would make sense from an espionage perspective is if somebody is cutting lines with the intention of getting caught. In other words, we know the russians have a tap on line A, so we cut lines A, B, C, D, and E. Foreign government says, hey, this is no coincidence, and checks all five lines, discovering tap. Tap is removed.
More realistically, if this were intentional I'd suspect it was a fringe middle eastern group trying to keep out western influences. That makes a lot more sense since presumably the countries that have the resources to tap undersea cables also have the wherewithal to do it without getting caught.
I'd argue that a good hardware design (digital logic, verilog, gate construction, basic circuit design) course and an assembly language course would be invaluable to the modern computer science major.
I am aware that Linux has excellent software raid support, I use it on all my servers. But Windows doesn't, so if I want to dual boot I need Windows and Linux to share a nvraid array.
I actually have thought a lot about what life was like for my grandparents, and more importantly, asked them about it. My grandfather was born just after WWI, lived through the great depression, then fought in WWII. Having lived through that, the Korean war, the cold war, Vietnam, the Kennedy Assassination, the space program, the civil rights movement, the fall of the soviet union, and 9/11, I always believed that he lived through perhaps the most interesting time in history, and almost certainly saw the greatest change in everyday life of perhaps any generation. He once told me that when he was a child he remembers not having a telephone, electricity, a car, a refrigerator, or even a radio (they were quite poor during the depression). I still remember, a few years ago, showing him how to connect to the internet and search it with Google, and telling him he could find pretty much anything he ever wanted to look up with it.
I seriously doubt that in my lifetime I will see anywhere near the amount of revolutionary change that he saw in his.
That's good to hear. I haven't tried in a little over a year, but this is definitely a big deal to me, as previously this configuration was most definitely non-trivial.
I would switch to Linux today if I could install on the NVRaid array I use for windows, and configure tri-monitor support using two different graphics cards running three different resolutions in under 3 or 4 hours. The problem I have with trying to use Linux on the desktop is that doing fairly ordinary things requires a substantial time investment, like, for instance, installing a wireless card.
I'm currently running Vista, and I have to disagree with you. It is definitely a resource pig. To get acceptable performance at this point I have disabled Aero and the majority of the other new services. While I like the searchable start menu and find it a very welcome addition, it is the only welcome addition that I have found. Does anyone know of software for XP that will duplicate this functionality?
Vista itself is incredibly frustrating. I disabled UAC after a couple of weeks because the constant warnings were driving me up a wall. There are a whole host of other issues though. For instance, sometimes when trying to remove files that I own, I'll get permission denied errors. I'm not talking about system files, or even files in use. I'm talking about data files that are in my Users directory, where I am listed as the owner. The only way I have found to remove these files is by removing them after a reboot. Additionally, there is still quite a bit of software that I have issues installing or using with Vista. Maple and some Eclipse functionality come to mind. It seems that whenever I set out to complete a task using Vista, I have to fight with the operating system and find workarounds every step of the way.
I've found the Vista experience to be an exercise in frustration, and I eagerly await switching back to XP. I hate it passionately, at this point more than I hate reinstalling.
That's the biggest problem that I see with PC gaming. Last week, I went out and bought a Nvidia 8800 GTS for $300, so that I could play some of the more recent PC games at an acceptable frame rate at my primary monitor's native resolutions (1680x1050). My computer is fairly modern, with a 2.66 GHZ dual core processor and 2 GB of DDR2 800. The problem is, even with this upgrade, I could only play Crysis at medium settings.
While it was definitely a performance improvement over my 6800 sli setup, the quality just wasn't there for the price. For another $100, I can get a PS3 that includes a Bluray player and I won't need to worry about tweaking settings and overclocking to get acceptable framerates. Granted, I could probably match the performance of my 360 or the PS3 if I upgraded my processor along with the graphics card, but if I were to do that, I'd be looking at a considerably more expensive upgrade. It just doesn't seem worth it any more.
Given that the huge number of consoles sold can have a large impact on which format wins, I wonder if the companies backing a particular format in the future would find it advantageous to subsidize the cost of the drive to a console manufacturer given that they don't really have that much to gain. In other words, I suspect that had Toshiba offered some serious financial incentive to Microsoft to include the drives in the 360, HD-DVD would now be the predominant format.
On the other hand, having the winning high def format drive has to be advantageous to Sony at this point, and makes the PS3 price seem not as unattractive as it once was. I know when I originally bought a PS2 I only really wanted to play GTA3, but I was able to justify the price to myself because, at the time, I didn't have a DVD player and it was a fairly inexpensive DVD player as well. I will probably eventually pick up a PS3 for the same reason.
I suspect the reason that the sun computing service hasn't taken off is because it doesn't have the ease of use of the Amazon services, which do roughly the same thing and have done pretty well. I can't speak for EC2, but I have used S3 enough to understand that it's dead easy, and I will be using EC2 in the future when I have the need.
I've noticed this with some of my code. I was paging through the source of an application that I've been using internally for about 10 years now the other day, and I noticed that a good portion of the code base dealt with error handling and bug workarounds that were never present in the original release, but were slowly integrated in as problems crept up over the years, things like leap year bugs that you wouldn't necessarily test for. While I noticed all of that code and all of the different error messages possible, I mentally noted that I can't recall the last time I had actually seen the application throw an error message. As the code aged its stability and ability to negotiate edge cases seems to have gone up substantially, to the point that it hardly ever needs maintenance today.
Some of the code is a bit sloppy and could be refactored, but why would I want to risk introducing new bugs into an application that operates more or less bug free today.