Second that. My home server runs FreeNAS on an EPIA 5000. Including a gigabit ethernet card, 4-port SATA card and four 1 TB drives, this system draws about 35 watts. When the drives spin down, power usage drops to
One downside is that the EPIA 5000 is too light-weight to do software RAID (even JBOD), which I found out the hard way (by losing data!), so I am now running the HD's as plain, separate partitions.
This is very much like the FEI Phenom microscope, which my company wrote the software for. The Phenom has been on the market for several years already. It's cheaper too, if I'm not mistaken.
It's of course a myth that products today are specifically engineered to fail right after the warranty expires. In this particular case, the more likely explanation is that the Russians simply accept a larger risk-factor than the other partners. Due to the politics involved, organizations like NASA and ESA are simply not allowed to fail, and so they will rather scuttle a module than squeeze the longest life possible out of it.
That, and the fact that NASA and ESA simply don't have the funds available to continue operating the ISS after 2015 or so.
This would be interesting for the treatment of tumors as well. A number of low-power X-ray laser beams converging on a tumor would create a very small, and precisely controllable, spot of high-intensity x-ray radiation.
While this is the first "hard" X-Ray laser, there have been lasers producing (softer) x-rays far longer.
When I was in college studying physics, we went on a field-trip to the FOM institute near Utrecht, the Netherlands. Even back then, they had a FEL operational that they told could produce coherent light in a large range of wavelengths. If I remember correctly, this range extended into the soft x-ray range.
The first office of my startup was in a shed in the back yard of a house owned by a former hippie in Berkeley, CA. It got extremely hot in there, but what made it worth mentioning here was that the land-lady was a little wacky.
At one point, we heard horrible screams coming from the house. Upon rushing in, we found the land-lady completely unharmed but with a self-help "screaming therapy" manual.
Later, a wasp-nest appeared under the roof of the patio, which we had to pass to reach the bathroom. When we asked the land-lady to remove it, she told us she couldn't until she had consulted her "healer", who was on vacation and wouldn't be back for another two weeks. The healer eventually advised the use of fly-paper.
CFL's are pretty much obsolete on arrival. At least here in the Netherlands, shelf-space is already shifting from CFL's to LED light-bulbs for the lower wattage models (Brighter bulbs are expected by the end of this year). LED bulbs consume even less power than CFL's: Most models are in the 1, 2 or 3 watt range (equivalent to 20-40 watt incandescent bulbs).
The article repeatedly stresses that blogging platform WordPress and CMS harness Joomla! occupy different levels of the content hierarchy.
Eh, yeah. That's pretty significant, as it completely invalidates the "Linux/MacOS" analogy. If Joomla is Linux, WordPress is OpenOffice (or Firefox, or Totem, or any other application).
Not that I'm a fanboy of Joomla! Or WordPress for that matter. I use both packages and, as has been pointed out, even by TFA itself, they're intended for different applications. Comparing their usability is like comparing the performance of a Ferrari and a John Deer tractor: Sure they're both motor-vehicles, but any comparison is meaningless
Funny thing is, their latest news item (not carried by all mirrors) is from April 4, 2008, and reads:
Added a two IOCCC web site mirrors [...] to support the upcomming source code release of winning entries for 2006.
Surely, announcing the upcoming source code release a year and a half after the competition closes, and then NOT doing it is, in an obfuscated way, sweetly ironic.
That would be true for a (sc)ramjet, which has no compressor turbine to suck in oxygen at low speeds. As I understand it, the whole idea of the Sabre engine was that it IS able to suck in atmospheric oxygen, so it doesn't need the LOX it carries until it reaches Mach 5.5.
Being a lefty myself, I seriously doubt if lefty's are more likely to use the mouse left-handed than righty's.
I've never come across someone who uses the mouse left-handed because they are left-handed, and actually know several right-handed people who use the mouse left-handed.
Reaction Engines Ltd have been working on this for well over 10 years now (maybe closer to 20) with not a lot of actual hardware to show for it. I first heard about Skylon when I was still in uni, around 1996 or so, and not much has happened since. So while the Skylon design is inordinately cool, with some very nifty and innovative features, I'm afraid it's never going to actually fly.
Sad, really, as it's one of Europe's few contenders in the non-gov space race, and probably the most promising one, in terms of design maturity.
Please, let Notes remain closed source forever! After having been forced to work with Notes by an employer, I have become convinced it is an evil piece of software, designed to corrupt the minds of its users. Give it to schools, and whole generations could be lost, forever doomed to believe that software cannot be user-friendly. In fact, let's start counter-movement to convince IBM that Notes is a dead product, and should be removed from the market ASAP. For the children!
(And don't give me that crap about how I must have used an old version, and the new version is LOTS better. As an example, Notes' proprietary IM client Sametime was up to version 6 when I used it, and offered only the most basic functionality compared to other IM systems).
In Europe, it seems you old employer generally has to keep paying you if they want the non-compete to be in force.
There's probably more variation between European countries than between US States. In the Netherlands, there is generally a 1-2 year non-compete clause in the contract. The employer certainly does not have to keep paying employees to enforce this non-compete. I don't know how this works in other countries.
Say I'm an inexperienced audio programmer and they give me a crash course in sound physics and psychoacoustics. I can't program sound for their competitor now?
Yes, indeed, although there will often be a clause in your contract that limits this to, for example, a year (or two).
Keep in mind though that the line between skill and domain-knowledge gets blurry quickly. Your example is a good one: is knowledge about sound physics and psychoacoustics a skill or domain knowledge? Hard to say. It's pretty specific knowledge, but anyone with internet access can find it. On the other hand, if you work for, say Dolby Labs, and leave them to start a company that makes noise-reduction software using algorithms you developed while at Dolby, then it's pretty clear you're doing something wrong.
Also, most of this discussion is very theoretical. If your former employer wants to sue you, they can pay a lawyer and find _something_ to do so. And vice versa. The question is what does either party stand to gain from such a course of action?
> Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or
> whatever?
Yes. Writing software requires part skill, part domain knowledge. Your employer cannot prevent you from using your skills (e.g. Programming in C++) at another job, but they can prevent you from using the domain knowledge you acquired on the job.
Whether you actually _will_ get in trouble is another matter entirely, of course.
Wait until the EA lawyers get wind of this. They'll file DMCA suits against EVERYBODY who tried to guess the last character for purposely trying to break a copy-protection scheme.
Oh no wait, the DMCA is sooo 20th century. They'll probably file terrorism charges instead.
Nope, as far as I know, this was a home-grown system.
In theory, the helpdesk has to call the phone-number listed with you info before changing the password. In practice, they didn't.
I used to work for Atos Origin (Although this was in the Netherlands, not the UK). In my experience, their insight into how security works is absolutely abysmal. When I worked there, it was no problem to reset someone else's password without their knowledge with a simple call to the help-desk.
At a later stage, they introduced a new 'lost-password' procedure for the intranet site which was positively retarded. In essence, when creating an account, you were required to enter three passwords. One of these was the actual password used to enter the site. When you had forgotten your password, you were then required to enter the other two passwords in order to reset the first one.
This was obviously intended as an implementation of the well-known "question-only-you-know-the-answer-to" challenge-response idea. The way it was done though (you had to enter both the 'answer' AND the 'question', and both were displayed as asterisks) rendered the whole system completely useless.
When I pointed this out to the helpdesk, they assured me the whole procedure was approved by very knowledgeable people, and very secure. Besides, there was absolutely no way for them to submit any problem reports to the developers responsible.
A previous co-worker of mine was always complaining about how all the email he got from the project lead was so distracting, and keeping him from getting work done. This surprised me, as I wasn't having this issue, even though we were on the same team, and getting essentially the same email. At some point though, we were was sitting behind his computer together when an email came in. That's when it became clear he had enabled every notification possible in Outlook: For every incoming email, a sound played, an icon started flashing in the system tray and a system-modal dialog popped up. When I pointed out that he might get a quieter day by disabling all notifications and simply checking his email manually a few times a day (As I do myself), he became very defensive and wouldn't hear about it. His argument was that some emails required his immediate attention, so he should know about their arrival instantly.
Now all we need is for HD manufacturers to stop defining "Gigabyte" as "1 billion bytes", so my 160 GB drive is actually 160 GB (171 billion bytes), and not 149 GB (160 billion bytes).
I see where you're coming from, and I agree with any argument against Security Theater, LCD thinking etc. I also agree people are responsible for their own actions. In short, we agree for the most part
>what the DO need to know they can learn in 5-10 minutes.
Except about this. What people CAN learn in 10 minutes is that a closed padlock means "OK", and no padlock means "NOT OK" when they're on their bank's website. Allowing self-signed certificates makes that whole story a lot more complicated. Suddenly, it's "padlock USUALLY means OK, but you do need to check the URL and you should really also check the contents of the cert". It's far better to be clear and unambiguous about it, not in the least because if someone does get bitten, it can also affect you and me (botnets, more spam, more viruses etc).
This isn't patronizing. People aren't stupid, and adults shouldn't be treated like children. But we do need to recognize that a great many users simply need this sort of guidance simply because they are not experts. There is no shame in this: Ignorance is not a sin, and doesn't equal stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Second that. My home server runs FreeNAS on an EPIA 5000. Including a gigabit ethernet card, 4-port SATA card and four 1 TB drives, this system draws about 35 watts. When the drives spin down, power usage drops to
One downside is that the EPIA 5000 is too light-weight to do software RAID (even JBOD), which I found out the hard way (by losing data!), so I am now running the HD's as plain, separate partitions.
This is very much like the FEI Phenom microscope, which my company wrote the software for. The Phenom has been on the market for several years already. It's cheaper too, if I'm not mistaken.
It's of course a myth that products today are specifically engineered to fail right after the warranty expires. In this particular case, the more likely explanation is that the Russians simply accept a larger risk-factor than the other partners. Due to the politics involved, organizations like NASA and ESA are simply not allowed to fail, and so they will rather scuttle a module than squeeze the longest life possible out of it.
That, and the fact that NASA and ESA simply don't have the funds available to continue operating the ISS after 2015 or so.
This would be interesting for the treatment of tumors as well. A number of low-power X-ray laser beams converging on a tumor would create a very small, and precisely controllable, spot of high-intensity x-ray radiation.
While this is the first "hard" X-Ray laser, there have been lasers producing (softer) x-rays far longer.
When I was in college studying physics, we went on a field-trip to the FOM institute near Utrecht, the Netherlands. Even back then, they had a FEL operational that they told could produce coherent light in a large range of wavelengths. If I remember correctly, this range extended into the soft x-ray range.
The first office of my startup was in a shed in the back yard of a house owned by a former hippie in Berkeley, CA. It got extremely hot in there, but what made it worth mentioning here was that the land-lady was a little wacky.
At one point, we heard horrible screams coming from the house. Upon rushing in, we found the land-lady completely unharmed but with a self-help "screaming therapy" manual.
Later, a wasp-nest appeared under the roof of the patio, which we had to pass to reach the bathroom. When we asked the land-lady to remove it, she told us she couldn't until she had consulted her "healer", who was on vacation and wouldn't be back for another two weeks. The healer eventually advised the use of fly-paper.
CFL's are pretty much obsolete on arrival. At least here in the Netherlands, shelf-space is already shifting from CFL's to LED light-bulbs for the lower wattage models (Brighter bulbs are expected by the end of this year). LED bulbs consume even less power than CFL's: Most models are in the 1, 2 or 3 watt range (equivalent to 20-40 watt incandescent bulbs).
>Now we just need to work out a way to remotely
>ask a computer if the printer cable is properly
>plugged in
Or the power cable, but that might be more problematic.
The article repeatedly stresses that blogging platform WordPress and CMS harness Joomla! occupy different levels of the content hierarchy.
Eh, yeah. That's pretty significant, as it completely invalidates the "Linux/MacOS" analogy. If Joomla is Linux, WordPress is OpenOffice (or Firefox, or Totem, or any other application).
Not that I'm a fanboy of Joomla! Or WordPress for that matter. I use both packages and, as has been pointed out, even by TFA itself, they're intended for different applications. Comparing their usability is like comparing the performance of a Ferrari and a John Deer tractor: Sure they're both motor-vehicles, but any comparison is meaningless
Funny thing is, their latest news item (not carried by all mirrors) is from April 4, 2008, and reads:
Added a two IOCCC web site mirrors [...] to support the upcomming source code release of winning entries for 2006.
Surely, announcing the upcoming source code release a year and a half after the competition closes, and then NOT doing it is, in an obfuscated way, sweetly ironic.
That would be true for a (sc)ramjet, which has no compressor turbine to suck in oxygen at low speeds. As I understand it, the whole idea of the Sabre engine was that it IS able to suck in atmospheric oxygen, so it doesn't need the LOX it carries until it reaches Mach 5.5.
Being a lefty myself, I seriously doubt if lefty's are more likely to use the mouse left-handed than righty's.
I've never come across someone who uses the mouse left-handed because they are left-handed, and actually know several right-handed people who use the mouse left-handed.
As a Slashdot reader, I'm sure you are tech-savvy enough to rip any discs you legally purchase.
Reaction Engines Ltd have been working on this for well over 10 years now (maybe closer to 20) with not a lot of actual hardware to show for it. I first heard about Skylon when I was still in uni, around 1996 or so, and not much has happened since. So while the Skylon design is inordinately cool, with some very nifty and innovative features, I'm afraid it's never going to actually fly.
Sad, really, as it's one of Europe's few contenders in the non-gov space race, and probably the most promising one, in terms of design maturity.
Please, let Notes remain closed source forever! After having been forced to work with Notes by an employer, I have become convinced it is an evil piece of software, designed to corrupt the minds of its users. Give it to schools, and whole generations could be lost, forever doomed to believe that software cannot be user-friendly. In fact, let's start counter-movement to convince IBM that Notes is a dead product, and should be removed from the market ASAP. For the children!
(And don't give me that crap about how I must have used an old version, and the new version is LOTS better. As an example, Notes' proprietary IM client Sametime was up to version 6 when I used it, and offered only the most basic functionality compared to other IM systems).
In Europe, it seems you old employer generally has to keep paying you if they want the non-compete to be in force.
There's probably more variation between European countries than between US States. In the Netherlands, there is generally a 1-2 year non-compete clause in the contract. The employer certainly does not have to keep paying employees to enforce this non-compete. I don't know how this works in other countries.
Say I'm an inexperienced audio programmer and they give me a crash course in sound physics and psychoacoustics. I can't program sound for their competitor now?
Yes, indeed, although there will often be a clause in your contract that limits this to, for example, a year (or two).
Keep in mind though that the line between skill and domain-knowledge gets blurry quickly. Your example is a good one: is knowledge about sound physics and psychoacoustics a skill or domain knowledge? Hard to say. It's pretty specific knowledge, but anyone with internet access can find it. On the other hand, if you work for, say Dolby Labs, and leave them to start a company that makes noise-reduction software using algorithms you developed while at Dolby, then it's pretty clear you're doing something wrong.
Also, most of this discussion is very theoretical. If your former employer wants to sue you, they can pay a lawyer and find _something_ to do so. And vice versa. The question is what does either party stand to gain from such a course of action?
> Can we be sued for IP infringement, theft, or > whatever?
Yes. Writing software requires part skill, part domain knowledge. Your employer cannot prevent you from using your skills (e.g. Programming in C++) at another job, but they can prevent you from using the domain knowledge you acquired on the job.
Whether you actually _will_ get in trouble is another matter entirely, of course.
As with all other responses here: IANAL
Wait until the EA lawyers get wind of this. They'll file DMCA suits against EVERYBODY who tried to guess the last character for purposely trying to break a copy-protection scheme.
Oh no wait, the DMCA is sooo 20th century. They'll probably file terrorism charges instead.
Nope, as far as I know, this was a home-grown system. In theory, the helpdesk has to call the phone-number listed with you info before changing the password. In practice, they didn't.
Which only goes to show the helpdesk-person completely failed to grasp my point :).
I used to work for Atos Origin (Although this was in the Netherlands, not the UK). In my experience, their insight into how security works is absolutely abysmal. When I worked there, it was no problem to reset someone else's password without their knowledge with a simple call to the help-desk.
At a later stage, they introduced a new 'lost-password' procedure for the intranet site which was positively retarded. In essence, when creating an account, you were required to enter three passwords. One of these was the actual password used to enter the site. When you had forgotten your password, you were then required to enter the other two passwords in order to reset the first one.
This was obviously intended as an implementation of the well-known "question-only-you-know-the-answer-to" challenge-response idea. The way it was done though (you had to enter both the 'answer' AND the 'question', and both were displayed as asterisks) rendered the whole system completely useless.
When I pointed this out to the helpdesk, they assured me the whole procedure was approved by very knowledgeable people, and very secure. Besides, there was absolutely no way for them to submit any problem reports to the developers responsible.
A previous co-worker of mine was always complaining about how all the email he got from the project lead was so distracting, and keeping him from getting work done. This surprised me, as I wasn't having this issue, even though we were on the same team, and getting essentially the same email. At some point though, we were was sitting behind his computer together when an email came in. That's when it became clear he had enabled every notification possible in Outlook: For every incoming email, a sound played, an icon started flashing in the system tray and a system-modal dialog popped up. When I pointed out that he might get a quieter day by disabling all notifications and simply checking his email manually a few times a day (As I do myself), he became very defensive and wouldn't hear about it. His argument was that some emails required his immediate attention, so he should know about their arrival instantly.
Now all we need is for HD manufacturers to stop defining "Gigabyte" as "1 billion bytes", so my 160 GB drive is actually 160 GB (171 billion bytes), and not 149 GB (160 billion bytes).
I see where you're coming from, and I agree with any argument against Security Theater, LCD thinking etc. I also agree people are responsible for their own actions. In short, we agree for the most part
>what the DO need to know they can learn in 5-10 minutes.
Except about this. What people CAN learn in 10 minutes is that a closed padlock means "OK", and no padlock means "NOT OK" when they're on their bank's website. Allowing self-signed certificates makes that whole story a lot more complicated. Suddenly, it's "padlock USUALLY means OK, but you do need to check the URL and you should really also check the contents of the cert". It's far better to be clear and unambiguous about it, not in the least because if someone does get bitten, it can also affect you and me (botnets, more spam, more viruses etc).
This isn't patronizing. People aren't stupid, and adults shouldn't be treated like children. But we do need to recognize that a great many users simply need this sort of guidance simply because they are not experts. There is no shame in this: Ignorance is not a sin, and doesn't equal stupidity.