What's the point of showing a "mock-up" of a video card ? For some other product, one for which the physical design is important, say a car or a blender or a house , then a mock-up provides some information and it also shows that a lot of work has been done. In fact it is a work product that is actually used in teh process of production. In the case of a video card , the fact that it's a, 2 slot PCIe card doesn't show that ANY work has been done etc. The mockup itself was only interesting BECAUSE it was sold as a functional product. To put it another way, this particular object would not have been produced for any development purpose other than to manipulate the impression of the press.
Most likely the marketing people thought that showing the prototype would cause the public to "misinterpret" the level of development because they'd see a bunch of wires and breadboards. So, to protect us public from our own "mis-perceptions" (and so that their stock price wouldn't suffer from same) they embarked on this path.
Is it the end of the world ? no, but this kind of marketing spin and storytelling should be condemned and punished whenever it raises its head because all it does is inject noise into the system.
I like this solution better than the optimistic locking usually seen in web apps, but it's a matter of the specific use-case, of course. This is a good method when there is a) significant chance of collision and/or b) editing takes a lot of effort or is high cost.
pessimistic locking (even with js automation, timeouts and overrides as you describe) has the downside of of high complexity/cost of implementation, and as the guy above says you still need versioning or other system as backup if this is at all an "important" system since you can't (shouldn't) trust that the web browser will do the right thing.
bugzilla's done ok w/ just collision detection for a good 10 or 15 years:-)
What's the actual change in policy that's the main target of your talk ? If you're just going to tell them that "you can't hit Facebook from work anymore" or "If you ever blog about the company we'll fire you" then you will have lost your audience already. Anything else you tell them may even be counter productive because it will be associated with the main negative message you just delivered.
In fact, along the same lines, if someone else decided this policy change (which i'm assuming is not "employee friendly") it may not be in your best interest to do the announcement. If it was a committee decision, then yes you should do it even if you don't agree with it. If it's the lawyers or the CEO or VP etc. cramming it down your throat, then consider, respectfully, asking him, her or them to do the announcement.
As to something you might say / do: consider suggesting that they get a nettop to use for personal business (if you allow such things on your network) and/or perhaps set-up or a secondary "guest" network that they might use for this purpose. Beyond that, the usual, use non-IE browser.... make sure you run some sort of virus scanner at home, run Spybot S&D every once in a while... don't ignore https warnings... The ATM thing may be a bit outside the scope of the talk.
bah, didn't initially realize that the vag-can was a 3rd party solution, should have been more skeptical of VW than i already was... Also didn't realize that the post i was referring to was just the next post.
I agree with the title of your post for an entirely different reason: I don't want the government to legislate this stuff. It should be something that is requested by consumers and responded to by manufacturers. For example, there's a post somewhere in this thread that points out that VW/Audi is much better about providing this data than Volvo. Thus, people should favor VW over Volvo for this if it's important to them. (for me this is good info because i generally have thought VW to be sort of overpriced and questionable qual, but this is a point to take into account).
The right path here is to pressure manufacturers to release all their ODB2 accessible codes and other specs and to implement the newer standards (as you mention).
What happened to the usual pseudo-libertarian/. sentiment ? We don't need to run to daddy government for every little thing!
"World of Ends" is one view of the network ceratainly, but if you look at wikipedia's article on the topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality#Definitions_of_network_neutrality you'll find three definitions of network neutrality and that two of the three have to do with QoS and traffic tiering. TFA doesn't provide any details as to what specifically the FCC is referring to.
The bandwidth issue is relevant because residential ISPs engage in oversubscription and rely on the fact that most connections are idle most of the time. I can't point you to solid industry wide numbers as to the ratio (as most companies don't reveal the information) but various places on the web put it from 10:1 to 50:1. Here is an example of an ISP in the SF Bay Area called Etheric http://www.dslreports.com/reviews/2384 that advertises overbooking ratio of 3.3:1 for their "Enterprise" service all the way to 20:1 for residential usage. They claim that that DSL competitors oversubscribe at up to 80:1.
Current residential ISP pricing is based on this model. If connections were priced no the assumption that you would actually use your 3mbps continuously all month, it would cost considerably more than $10 or $20/mo.
When Comcast and British Telecom and others have engaged in throttling thus far it has been to curb the usage of users using high amounts of bandwidth. I haven't heard yet of Comcast prioritizing their own VoIP over Vonnage VoIP or similar.
Here is a relatively extensive article on commercial ISP realities http://jobs.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-comm/articles/22237-dismal-reality-internet-management.htm. Prices have come down some since that was written so, in a colo, you can now get quality transfer for ~$5/Mbit per month (95 percentile) if you're buying multiple gigabits, but otherwise it's right on. (I have no connection to the author, just found the post via Google).
"all packets are equal" is a nice idea, but i certainly wouldn't want to pay for it. (Actually, i currently wouldn't mind paying for it since i neither torrent nor watch much video, but i wouldn't want to pay for it if i were a heavy consumer of media delivered through the internet.)
(apologies for the bad formatting. I still can't figure out what slashcode wants me to do to make a paragraph)
Video over the internet is exactly the issue (currently). Video streams, especially the higher qualities, are 1 to 2 orders of magnitude larger than audio and several orders of magnitude larger than text based communication like email and IM. One 2mbit video stream would be enough to serve a whole city's email needs.
I like net neutrality as a concept, e.g. i don't want Comcast blocking my port 25, but on the other hand there will eventually have to be some use-based pricing because transfer does cost money. So if networks don't impose some usage caps or use QoS to provide multiple tiers, then we're just going to end up with metered service (like water, power, gas, phones and cell phones)... and that's going to hurt enthusiasts just as much if not more.
The real problem, imho, is that speed limits are artificially low. In the US anyway, the only reason to follow the speed limit is to avoid fines. The numbers are unnecessarily conservative for most driving.
In fact, i can drive past a cop at the speed limit in the rain and not get a ticket though clearly I have a much lower margin of safety going 65 in the rain than I do going 65 on dry pavement.
Similarly, one is allowed to go the same speed at night as during the day even though visibility is definitely impaired.
(Yes, I know the limit is set as an upper limit and that cops can ticket you for going an unsafe speed for the conditions, etc, etc. but in practice it doesn't happen for up to moderate levels of inclement levels. And in fog or a downpour or blizzard, well most people slow down well below the speed limit anyway.)
I do like the "advised speed" that's attached to signs signaling curves ahead. That actually provides useful information about the road rather than info about the revenue generation and/or paranoia of the local residents.
They propose that a weakened immune system allows the virus into the brain.
There, it causes flare-ups in the brain at various times when the person is stressed etc. Basically, just like the cold sores on your lips.... but in the brain.
These cause the cells to create this non-soluble plaque stuff which then gets left behind when the cells themselves die.
The treatment with anti-virals would presumably prevent, or decrease, the number of "flare-ups" in the brain and therefore reduce the rate at which this Alzheimer's inducing plaque is formed.
(although i'm not clear on whether the damage is caused by the plaques or if the plaques are just a marker of all the cells that have been destroyed and the disease is actually caused by that destruction.)
if you've had cold sores and paid attention to how they seem to develop one can see how it would be destructive.
1) You start out perfectly fine.
2) For whatever reason this virus starts reproducing in some of your cells (highly localized)
3) a cluster of blisters forms.
4) After a few days, the "blisters" stop forming and you're left with a moderately significant wound that takes a while to heal.
Now imagine this happening in your brain... and remember that nerve cells, unlike skin cells, don't really reproduce much (if at all).
(Incidentally, i'm one of the people for whom Abreva (an OTC medicine) works very well. If I put it on in time it stops the progression in its tracks. HIGHLY recommended.
now if i could only figure out how to rub it on my brain.....)
i'm no fan of most teachers' grievances & teachers unions but this woman was thrown to the dogs for no good reason.
a) I'm not sure what circles you run in, but being convicted of anything more than a speeding ticket is pretty serious in today's society unless you are a superstar of some sort (sports, politics, movies, etc). This is especially true if you're dealing with children or money.
b) losing one's teaching credentials is a big deal when one is a teacher. Hopefully she'll find some private school that isn't encumbered by the whole credential process to hire her, but i wouldn't hold my breath. In spite of your claims this single incident says virtually nothing about her character, skill or ability to teach kids.
The proper level of "discipline" and "punishment" in this case should have been being talked to by the principal.
I think this post is more the cynical rant of a mid-career engineer who's been worked over by industry for 20 years rather than an actual Troll about prostitution.
As such, it provides legitimate, if terse and cryptic, commentary on the career trajectories of some among the mathematically inclined/adept.
Yeah TFA doesn't make much sense at all. It describes the basic concept of a CDN and somehow says LimeLight is special.
The whole point of ANY CDN is that it caches copies of the data in various locations that are close to the viewers. Whether the data gets to each cache location over the internet or whether it's distributed there via some private network is largely irrelevant.
As to peering relationships... Akamai (or any other CDN) is going to have peering relationships with ISPs (aka "eyeball networks" ).
If i had to guess, NBC probably used LimeLight for their video because their rates are considerably cheaper than Akamai (and they're probably willing to discount deeper to get the publicity, whereas akamai doesn't need it).
Further, the reason NBC used Akamai for their images and site chrome is likely because LL's performance dealing with small objects isn't as good. Most CDNs (including LL) are optimized for dealing out relatively large files (say > 250k) , like PDFs, flash files, ISOs and videos rather than the.js,.css and small images that make up most of a website.
In addition to the truthiness problem, i hate the style.
The way these things are written just drains the humor out of them.
What i mean is that the stories come with their own built in (though morbid) "punchline": namely that the characters die somehow. But instead of just describing what happens the authors (?) add silly titles and pithy comments and point out to the reader how stupid the people involved are. I'm not asking for high literature but this presentation is terrible.
Finally, these people are already dead. Present their stories as interesting or cautionary or funny, but you don't have to pick on them. If told with disdain, any death that results from a risky activity (especially if it is optional) sounds stupid. Skiing, flying, parachuting, surfing, motorcycle riding all qualify.
He said. "This will do for documents what Hotmail did for e-mail. Why spend $400 on an upgrade when you can get it for free?"
Office 2007, the biggest advance in the system in ten years, took more than 2,000 Microsoft programmers three years to develop. Thirty-two software engineers in Bangalore, India's IT hub, took four years to break Microsoft's code so that they could replicate it online.
InstaColl said that it was not infringing copyright because of a legal ruling that concluded that it was not possible to patent the "look and feel" of a computer interface.
At least when Compaq reverse engineered the PC BIOS it was a technological achievement of sorts though that too was, imo, a crap move (even if ultimately legal and brought down prices for consumers).
You want to offer a better and/or lower priced alternative; fine. Bragging about how you're great because you ripped off someone else's stuff, on the other hand, is pretty crass. Yes, MS sucks in a lot of ways, and they are perhaps the biggest biters of all, but it's still not something to brag about.
I don't have anything substantial to say, but to me it sounds somewhat like trying to legislate the value of pi. Not exactly the same thing as definition of a time coordinate system is ultimately arbitrary, but it's in the same vein.
Previous place i worked we had a Google Mini and it was better than anything we had come up with in-house.
We even pointed it at the web-cvs server and bugzilla and it was great at searching those too.
To see all the bugs still open against v 2.2.1 or something like that bugzilla's own search was better. but for searching for "bugs about X" the google mini was great.
It only cost something like $3k ircc.
not exactly what you asked about, but you should definitely see if this wouldn't work for you instead.
This is very interesting. I too would generally rank Google and Yahoo as my top search engines in terms of "quality.
A few months ago, though, I became aware of Yahoo's "paid inclusion" program. Basically you pay Yahoo money, and your company is more likely to show up in the "organic" results area of the search. Note i'm not talking about the sponsored results at the top of the page or the ones on the right side, the "paid inclusion" results are indistinguishable from normal search results. Apparently this is a well known feature in the industry but personally i was surprised to find out about it.
Technically, the ranking algorithm doesn't weigh these sites higher. PI just assures that your site is crawled often and that it is "crawled" according to the page definition feed that you provide.
I ran into this whole concept because i was surprised that the company i work for came up at the top of certain searches even though we have a lot of competitors. Even though we ARE better and more popular than many of our competitors, i was still surprised that we were at the top on some pretty specific terms. It showed a keener understanding of our site than i would have expected a crawler to have. At first i was really psyched about Yahoo's technology, but then i found out that we use paid inclusion.:-)
I'm still undecided how i feel about this program. In my mind the main results are supposed to be purely based on site content/popularity , unlike the sponsored links. When you get an advantage by paying for access to their crawler... that's no longer the case. On the other hand, this isn't THAT different from other SEO techniques which are by definition mechanical ways that you can improve your standing. Only difference is that yahoo is directly involved in it.
So the relative savings per-capita are going to drop.
At the same time, the expectations of the newly rich are going to change in other ways and these countries are going to have to deal with various problems that the US has already dealt with or is dealing with. (environmental protection, income disparity , urbanization, etc.)
That's further going to put a damper on some growth.
So yes, there's going to be equalization of skills around the world but equalization of costs is going to follow. They're not exactly going to offset each other, and there's going to be a lag of years, but its premature to count the US out.
If France and Italy and their legislated 35 hour work weeks and 6-month severance pay haven't crashed (yet) I think we'll be ok for a while.
I thougth the "tubes" analogy was fine, myself. I don't know why people got on his case about it. Usually when i try to describe the internet I liken it to the mail system. You have "envelopes" that are addressed to someplace. Then they get picked up by someone, thrown on a truck, routed etc. It's basically the same thing that happens with packets as they get routed.
As far as the WWW goes, that's a different and distinct thing that's built on top of the Internet. I don't think it's really that hard to explain. It's just like a library or newspaper basically.
If you want to get into the finer social implications.. then that's another story, but the basics, I think, are easily understood in terms of familiar concepts.
I'm rather curious myself. It certainly doesn't look like a "stolen idea" in any straight forward manner. Judging from the article it looks more like a power-play.
Mr. Molnar looks to be employing an approach of "establishing facts on the ground". That is, instead of asking people (the list) to comment on his IDEA for doing something he went ahead and did it and presented the patch set. This switches the discussion from "is this an interesting avenue for inquiry?" to "what specific thing can you point out that is wrong with this thing ?". I've seen this in the corporate world all the time and it's considered the mark of someone who "gets things done" and "moves the ball forward".
Often it actually IS a good thing and prevents teams of people from getting bogged down in endless discussion without ever producing anything of worth. On the flip side it annoys the heck out of people if it's used to short-circuit debate, one-up others etc.
In this case Mr. Molnar's argument that he's just putting something forth for discussion and this was the fastest way to do it rings kind of hollow to me. Clearly he had been opposing similar, and less desruptive, propositions for years and had been using his position of relative authority to keep them out of the kernel.
Further, the argument that Linux shouldn't have pluggable schedulers I also find curious. For example it already has pluggable io schedulers that you can choose with boot time parameters AND change on a live system through the/sys fs. Yes the process scheduler is a biger deal, but it would have no impact on most users, it would make things easier for others, and would make things harder for few, if any.
Mr. Trovalds chimes in with a "free market" argument and says that he likes competition and competitiveness.
In the end is Mr. Molnar pulling a power play or is Mr. Kolivas being "whiny" ? My suspicion is the former. As I mentioned above, i don't find compelling the distinctions he draws between his current work and the work he'd rejected previously. Then again i've been accused of too often siding with the underdog. (note: i don't have anything to do with linux development though i've been a linux user for ~13 years and a software engineer for 10).
(On a grander note, this whole question of the balance between competition and cooperation I personally find very difficult to deal with. Both extremes are bad: no competition = no innovation. hyper-competition = some sort of dystopian Ferengi scenario. Guess i should go read Adam Smith... or something)
Hmm... I hadn't heard of Colemak until you mentioned it here; just looked it up. I don't see what the point is really. Learning Dvorak isn't THAT hard and Colemak doesn't do anything for punctuation so it won't be any better for programming.
If I had to do it over again... I'd probably still go with Dvorak though i think the real boon will be if someone ever comes up with a good 1 handed, mobile chording entry method to replace the thumb typing on blackberries and similar. That's the next text input frontier. Maybe i'll try out the Bat again. I bought one a long time ago and never learned how to use it...
Heh. Back in '94 when i switched to Dvorak i did it EXPRESSLY to force myself to touch type.
I had also taken a typing class once (in middle school) and didn't really like it. I was a decent 4-6 finger typist at the time but still had to look at the keyboard even though i generally knew where the keys were. Speaking only for myself, learning to touch type (or rather, forcing myself to do it until it felt natural) was definitely worth the investment. Now i really don't have to think about the typing at all. I just think the word and it happens. It's actually a bit disturbing in that i couldn't say where the specific keys are on the keyboard since my fingers just DTRT.
Sadly, i still kind of hunt around for some symbols and digits: I waste an inordinate amount of time hitting "0" instead of "[" and "[" instead of "]". It's not that i look at the keys to find them, but there's alaways half second of uncertainty and stress on those every time. In other words i have to think about them... which breaks the flow i was talking about above. I really should do something about that.
Anyway, bottom line for me is that touch-typing in Dvorak is great; i recommend it highly. I suspect that touch-typing in QWERTY is almost as good though i have never done it.
Wow, i didn't think anyone used Dvorak anymore. I've been using it for years and i agree with other people here that it's not particularly great for coding. The right hand pinky gets nearly as much of a workout in Dvorak as it does in QWERTY.
Now, as to how to learn it. The way i did it was to grab an image of the layout off of the web and i edited it to separate the keys into three groups by column: The left-most group was everything under keys 1 - 4, the middle column the things that were under 5 and 6 and the right-most group everything else. Then i put the image up on the screen in a corner and referred to it whenever i needed to hit a key and i didn't know where it was. I found the spliting it up made it much easier to visualize which finger i should be using for each key since all of the fingers (except for the index fingers and the right pinky stay in their own columns. Hmm... if i had to do it over maybe i would further separate the extra right pinky cluster.
The first two or three days... it was pretty darned painful, but it got better quickly after that. (Note, i didn't touch type in Qwerty (and still don't)).
To clarify what i meant about the keyboard layout... my picture looked something like what's below (but i've added my newly devised separation for the area where the right pinky reaches out to the right from its own column):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 [ ] ' , . p y f g c r l / = \ a o e u i d h t n s - ; q j k x b m w v z
Note: if you have a MS Natural keyboard or similar you'll have to hit the 6 with your left index finger, but c'est la vie.
check out this guy's blog entry for a picture one might modify. http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/CommentView ,guid,5b057212-590e-4ed4-bf53-3b971d3ba60d.aspx (hmm... maybe i should copyright and or trademark this split keyboard image idea:-) )
Slashdot Mirror
What's the point of showing a "mock-up" of a video card ? For some other product, one for which the physical design is important, say a car or a blender or a house , then a mock-up provides some information and it also shows that a lot of work has been done. In fact it is a work product that is actually used in teh process of production. In the case of a video card , the fact that it's a, 2 slot PCIe card doesn't show that ANY work has been done etc. The mockup itself was only interesting BECAUSE it was sold as a functional product. To put it another way, this particular object would not have been produced for any development purpose other than to manipulate the impression of the press.
Most likely the marketing people thought that showing the prototype would cause the public to "misinterpret" the level of development because they'd see a bunch of wires and breadboards. So, to protect us public from our own "mis-perceptions" (and so that their stock price wouldn't suffer from same) they embarked on this path.
Is it the end of the world ? no, but this kind of marketing spin and storytelling should be condemned and punished whenever it raises its head because all it does is inject noise into the system.
I like this solution better than the optimistic locking usually seen in web apps, but it's a matter of the specific use-case, of course. This is a good method when there is a) significant chance of collision and/or b) editing takes a lot of effort or is high cost.
pessimistic locking (even with js automation, timeouts and overrides as you describe) has the downside of of high complexity/cost of implementation, and as the guy above says you still need versioning or other system as backup if this is at all an "important" system since you can't (shouldn't) trust that the web browser will do the right thing.
bugzilla's done ok w/ just collision detection for a good 10 or 15 years :-)
What's the actual change in policy that's the main target of your talk ? If you're just going to tell them that "you can't hit Facebook from work anymore" or "If you ever blog about the company we'll fire you" then you will have lost your audience already. Anything else you tell them may even be counter productive because it will be associated with the main negative message you just delivered.
In fact, along the same lines, if someone else decided this policy change (which i'm assuming is not "employee friendly") it may not be in your best interest to do the announcement. If it was a committee decision, then yes you should do it even if you don't agree with it. If it's the lawyers or the CEO or VP etc. cramming it down your throat, then consider, respectfully, asking him, her or them to do the announcement.
As to something you might say / do: consider suggesting that they get a nettop to use for personal business (if you allow such things on your network) and/or perhaps set-up or a secondary "guest" network that they might use for this purpose. Beyond that, the usual, use non-IE browser.... make sure you run some sort of virus scanner at home, run Spybot S&D every once in a while... don't ignore https warnings... The ATM thing may be a bit outside the scope of the talk.
bah, didn't initially realize that the vag-can was a 3rd party solution, should have been more skeptical of VW than i already was... Also didn't realize that the post i was referring to was just the next post.
I agree with the title of your post for an entirely different reason: I don't want the government to legislate this stuff. It should be something that is requested by consumers and responded to by manufacturers. For example, there's a post somewhere in this thread that points out that VW/Audi is much better about providing this data than Volvo. Thus, people should favor VW over Volvo for this if it's important to them. (for me this is good info because i generally have thought VW to be sort of overpriced and questionable qual, but this is a point to take into account).
The right path here is to pressure manufacturers to release all their ODB2 accessible codes and other specs and to implement the newer standards (as you mention).
What happened to the usual pseudo-libertarian /. sentiment ? We don't need to run to daddy government for every little thing!
There's no need to get snarky, mmmkay ?
"World of Ends" is one view of the network ceratainly, but if you look at wikipedia's article on the topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality#Definitions_of_network_neutrality you'll find three definitions of network neutrality and that two of the three have to do with QoS and traffic tiering. TFA doesn't provide any details as to what specifically the FCC is referring to.
The bandwidth issue is relevant because residential ISPs engage in oversubscription and rely on the fact that most connections are idle most of the time. I can't point you to solid industry wide numbers as to the ratio (as most companies don't reveal the information) but various places on the web put it from 10:1 to 50:1. Here is an example of an ISP in the SF Bay Area called Etheric http://www.dslreports.com/reviews/2384 that advertises overbooking ratio of 3.3:1 for their "Enterprise" service all the way to 20:1 for residential usage. They claim that that DSL competitors oversubscribe at up to 80:1.
Current residential ISP pricing is based on this model. If connections were priced no the assumption that you would actually use your 3mbps continuously all month, it would cost considerably more than $10 or $20 /mo.
When Comcast and British Telecom and others have engaged in throttling thus far it has been to curb the usage of users using high amounts of bandwidth. I haven't heard yet of Comcast prioritizing their own VoIP over Vonnage VoIP or similar.
Here is a relatively extensive article on commercial ISP realities http://jobs.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-comm/articles/22237-dismal-reality-internet-management.htm. Prices have come down some since that was written so, in a colo, you can now get quality transfer for ~$5/Mbit per month (95 percentile) if you're buying multiple gigabits, but otherwise it's right on. (I have no connection to the author, just found the post via Google).
"all packets are equal" is a nice idea, but i certainly wouldn't want to pay for it. (Actually, i currently wouldn't mind paying for it since i neither torrent nor watch much video, but i wouldn't want to pay for it if i were a heavy consumer of media delivered through the internet.)
(apologies for the bad formatting. I still can't figure out what slashcode wants me to do to make a paragraph)
Video over the internet is exactly the issue (currently). Video streams, especially the higher qualities, are 1 to 2 orders of magnitude larger than audio and several orders of magnitude larger than text based communication like email and IM. One 2mbit video stream would be enough to serve a whole city's email needs.
I like net neutrality as a concept, e.g. i don't want Comcast blocking my port 25, but on the other hand there will eventually have to be some use-based pricing because transfer does cost money. So if networks don't impose some usage caps or use QoS to provide multiple tiers, then we're just going to end up with metered service (like water, power, gas, phones and cell phones)... and that's going to hurt enthusiasts just as much if not more.
Ok, i'll bite.
In my case I commute by walking to a rail station and then taking a train (or sometimes a LRV)
Any other insightful comments ?
The real problem, imho, is that speed limits are artificially low. In the US anyway, the only reason to follow the speed limit is to avoid fines. The numbers are unnecessarily conservative for most driving.
In fact, i can drive past a cop at the speed limit in the rain and not get a ticket though clearly I have a much lower margin of safety going 65 in the rain than I do going 65 on dry pavement.
Similarly, one is allowed to go the same speed at night as during the day even though visibility is definitely impaired.
(Yes, I know the limit is set as an upper limit and that cops can ticket you for going an unsafe speed for the conditions, etc, etc. but in practice it doesn't happen for up to moderate levels of inclement levels. And in fog or a downpour or blizzard, well most people slow down well below the speed limit anyway.)
I do like the "advised speed" that's attached to signs signaling curves ahead. That actually provides useful information about the road rather than info about the revenue generation and/or paranoia of the local residents.
they think it causes it:
They propose that a weakened immune system allows the virus into the brain.
There, it causes flare-ups in the brain at various times when the person is stressed etc. Basically, just like the cold sores on your lips.... but in the brain.
These cause the cells to create this non-soluble plaque stuff which then gets left behind when the cells themselves die.
The treatment with anti-virals would presumably prevent, or decrease, the number of "flare-ups" in the brain and therefore reduce the rate at which this Alzheimer's inducing plaque is formed.
(although i'm not clear on whether the damage is caused by the plaques or if the plaques are just a marker of all the cells that have been destroyed and the disease is actually caused by that destruction.)
if you've had cold sores and paid attention to how they seem to develop one can see how it would be destructive.
1) You start out perfectly fine.
2) For whatever reason this virus starts reproducing in some of your cells (highly localized)
3) a cluster of blisters forms.
4) After a few days, the "blisters" stop forming and you're left with a moderately significant wound that takes a while to heal.
Now imagine this happening in your brain... and remember that nerve cells, unlike skin cells, don't really reproduce much (if at all).
(Incidentally, i'm one of the people for whom Abreva (an OTC medicine) works very well. If I put it on in time it stops the progression in its tracks. HIGHLY recommended.
now if i could only figure out how to rub it on my brain.....)
i'm no fan of most teachers' grievances & teachers unions but this woman was thrown to the dogs for no good reason.
a) I'm not sure what circles you run in, but being convicted of anything more than a speeding ticket is pretty serious in today's society unless you are a superstar of some sort (sports, politics, movies, etc). This is especially true if you're dealing with children or money.
b) losing one's teaching credentials is a big deal when one is a teacher. Hopefully she'll find some private school that isn't encumbered by the whole credential process to hire her, but i wouldn't hold my breath. In spite of your claims this single incident says virtually nothing about her character, skill or ability to teach kids.
The proper level of "discipline" and "punishment" in this case should have been being talked to by the principal.
I think this post is more the cynical rant of a mid-career engineer who's been worked over by industry for 20 years rather than an actual Troll about prostitution.
As such, it provides legitimate, if terse and cryptic, commentary on the career trajectories of some among the mathematically inclined/adept.
not that i'd know anything about that....
The NOTAM for the temporary flight restriction (no fly zone) just established.
http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_8_1954.html
Yeah TFA doesn't make much sense at all. It describes the basic concept of a CDN and somehow says LimeLight is special.
The whole point of ANY CDN is that it caches copies of the data in various locations that are close to the viewers. Whether the data gets to each cache location over the internet or whether it's distributed there via some private network is largely irrelevant.
As to peering relationships... Akamai (or any other CDN) is going to have peering relationships with ISPs (aka "eyeball networks" ).
If i had to guess, NBC probably used LimeLight for their video because their rates are considerably cheaper than Akamai (and they're probably willing to discount deeper to get the publicity, whereas akamai doesn't need it).
Further, the reason NBC used Akamai for their images and site chrome is likely because LL's performance dealing with small objects isn't as good. Most CDNs (including LL) are optimized for dealing out relatively large files (say > 250k) , like PDFs, flash files, ISOs and videos rather than the .js, .css and small images that make up most of a website.
In addition to the truthiness problem, i hate the style.
The way these things are written just drains the humor out of them.
What i mean is that the stories come with their own built in (though morbid) "punchline": namely that the characters die somehow. But instead of just describing what happens the authors (?) add silly titles and pithy comments and point out to the reader how stupid the people involved are. I'm not asking for high literature but this presentation is terrible.
Finally, these people are already dead. Present their stories as interesting or cautionary or funny, but you don't have to pick on them. If told with disdain, any death that results from a risky activity (especially if it is optional) sounds stupid. Skiing, flying, parachuting, surfing, motorcycle riding all qualify.
At least when Compaq reverse engineered the PC BIOS it was a technological achievement of sorts though that too was, imo, a crap move (even if ultimately legal and brought down prices for consumers).
You want to offer a better and/or lower priced alternative; fine. Bragging about how you're great because you ripped off someone else's stuff, on the other hand, is pretty crass. Yes, MS sucks in a lot of ways, and they are perhaps the biggest biters of all, but it's still not something to brag about.
I don't have anything substantial to say, but to me it sounds somewhat like trying to legislate the value of pi. Not exactly the same thing as definition of a time coordinate system is ultimately arbitrary, but it's in the same vein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
Previous place i worked we had a Google Mini and it was better than anything we had come up with in-house.
We even pointed it at the web-cvs server and bugzilla and it was great at searching those too.
To see all the bugs still open against v 2.2.1 or something like that bugzilla's own search was better. but for searching for "bugs about X" the google mini was great.
It only cost something like $3k ircc.
not exactly what you asked about, but you should definitely see if this wouldn't work for you instead.
This is very interesting. I too would generally rank Google and Yahoo as my top search engines in terms of "quality.
:-)
A few months ago, though, I became aware of Yahoo's "paid inclusion" program. Basically you pay Yahoo money, and your company is more likely to show up in the "organic" results area of the search. Note i'm not talking about the sponsored results at the top of the page or the ones on the right side, the "paid inclusion" results are indistinguishable from normal search results. Apparently this is a well known feature in the industry but personally i was surprised to find out about it.
Technically, the ranking algorithm doesn't weigh these sites higher. PI just assures that your site is crawled often and that it is "crawled" according to the page definition feed that you provide.
here's a link to the program:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/ssp.php
I ran into this whole concept because i was surprised that the company i work for came up at the top of certain searches even though we have a lot of competitors. Even though we ARE better and more popular than many of our competitors, i was still surprised that we were at the top on some pretty specific terms. It showed a keener understanding of our site than i would have expected a crawler to have. At first i was really psyched about Yahoo's technology, but then i found out that we use paid inclusion.
I'm still undecided how i feel about this program. In my mind the main results are supposed to be purely based on site content/popularity , unlike the sponsored links. When you get an advantage by paying for access to their crawler... that's no longer the case. On the other hand, this isn't THAT different from other SEO techniques which are by definition mechanical ways that you can improve your standing. Only difference is that yahoo is directly involved in it.
Yes, but there's a flip side to your argument:
For one thing, even at the current skill level India is having problems with wage inflation and huge turnover in IT.
This link has the price inflation at 15% , but a recent NPR show I heard suggested it was even higher in some sectors.
http://www.mitechnews.com/articles.asp?id=7114
So the relative savings per-capita are going to drop.
At the same time, the expectations of the newly rich are going to change in other ways and these countries are going to have to deal with various problems that the US has already dealt with or is dealing with. (environmental protection, income disparity , urbanization, etc.)
That's further going to put a damper on some growth.
So yes, there's going to be equalization of skills around the world but equalization of costs is going to follow. They're not exactly going to offset each other, and there's going to be a lag of years, but its premature to count the US out.
If France and Italy and their legislated 35 hour work weeks and 6-month severance pay haven't crashed (yet) I think we'll be ok for a while.
I thougth the "tubes" analogy was fine, myself. I don't know why people got on his case about it.
Usually when i try to describe the internet I liken it to the mail system. You have "envelopes" that are addressed to someplace. Then they get picked up by someone, thrown on a truck, routed etc. It's basically the same thing that happens with packets as they get routed.
As far as the WWW goes, that's a different and distinct thing that's built on top of the Internet. I don't think it's really that hard to explain. It's just like a library or newspaper basically.
If you want to get into the finer social implications.. then that's another story, but the basics, I think, are easily understood in terms of familiar concepts.
I'm rather curious myself. It certainly doesn't look like a "stolen idea" in any straight forward manner. Judging from the article it looks more like a power-play.
/sys fs. Yes the process scheduler is a biger deal, but it would have no impact on most users, it would make things easier for others, and would make things harder for few, if any.
Mr. Molnar looks to be employing an approach of "establishing facts on the ground". That is, instead of asking people (the list) to comment on his IDEA for doing something he went ahead and did it and presented the patch set. This switches the discussion from "is this an interesting avenue for inquiry?" to "what specific thing can you point out that is wrong with this thing ?". I've seen this in the corporate world all the time and it's considered the mark of someone who "gets things done" and "moves the ball forward".
Often it actually IS a good thing and prevents teams of people from getting bogged down in endless discussion without ever producing anything of worth. On the flip side it annoys the heck out of people if it's used to short-circuit debate, one-up others etc.
In this case Mr. Molnar's argument that he's just putting something forth for discussion and this was the fastest way to do it rings kind of hollow to me. Clearly he had been opposing similar, and less desruptive, propositions for years and had been using his position of relative authority to keep them out of the kernel.
Further, the argument that Linux shouldn't have pluggable schedulers I also find curious. For example it already has pluggable io schedulers that you can choose with boot time parameters AND change on a live system through the
Mr. Trovalds chimes in with a "free market" argument and says that he likes competition and competitiveness.
In the end is Mr. Molnar pulling a power play or is Mr. Kolivas being "whiny" ? My suspicion is the former. As I mentioned above, i don't find compelling the distinctions he draws between his current work and the work he'd rejected previously. Then again i've been accused of too often siding with the underdog.
(note: i don't have anything to do with linux development though i've been a linux user for ~13 years and a software engineer for 10).
(On a grander note, this whole question of the balance between competition and cooperation I personally find very difficult to deal with. Both extremes are bad: no competition = no innovation. hyper-competition = some sort of dystopian Ferengi scenario. Guess i should go read Adam Smith... or something)
Hmm... I hadn't heard of Colemak until you mentioned it here; just looked it up. I don't see what the point is really. Learning Dvorak isn't THAT hard and Colemak doesn't do anything for punctuation so it won't be any better for programming.
If I had to do it over again... I'd probably still go with Dvorak though i think the real boon will be if someone ever comes up with a good 1 handed, mobile chording entry method to replace the thumb typing on blackberries and similar. That's the next text input frontier. Maybe i'll try out the Bat again. I bought one a long time ago and never learned how to use it...
Heh. Back in '94 when i switched to Dvorak i did it EXPRESSLY to force myself to touch type.
I had also taken a typing class once (in middle school) and didn't really like it. I was a decent 4-6 finger typist at the time but still had to look at the keyboard even though i generally knew where the keys were. Speaking only for myself, learning to touch type (or rather, forcing myself to do it until it felt natural) was definitely worth the investment. Now i really don't have to think about the typing at all. I just think the word and it happens. It's actually a bit disturbing in that i couldn't say where the specific keys are on the keyboard since my fingers just DTRT.
Sadly, i still kind of hunt around for some symbols and digits: I waste an inordinate amount of time hitting "0" instead of "[" and "[" instead of "]". It's not that i look at the keys to find them, but there's alaways half second of uncertainty and stress on those every time. In other words i have to think about them... which breaks the flow i was talking about above. I really should do something about that.
Anyway, bottom line for me is that touch-typing in Dvorak is great; i recommend it highly. I suspect that touch-typing in QWERTY is almost as good though i have never done it.
Wow, i didn't think anyone used Dvorak anymore. I've been using it for years and i agree with other people here that it's not particularly great for coding. The right hand pinky gets nearly as much of a workout in Dvorak as it does in QWERTY.
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:-) )
Now, as to how to learn it. The way i did it was to grab an image of the layout off of the web and i edited it to separate the keys into three groups by column:
The left-most group was everything under keys 1 - 4, the middle column the things that were under 5 and 6 and the right-most group everything else. Then i put the image up on the screen in a corner and referred to it whenever i needed to hit a key and i didn't know where it was. I found the spliting it up made it much easier to visualize which finger i should be using for each key since all of the fingers (except for the index fingers and the right pinky stay in their own columns. Hmm... if i had to do it over maybe i would further separate the extra right pinky cluster.
The first two or three days... it was pretty darned painful, but it got better quickly after that. (Note, i didn't touch type in Qwerty (and still don't)).
To clarify what i meant about the keyboard layout... my picture looked something like what's below (but i've added my newly devised separation for the area where the right pinky reaches out to the right from its own column):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 [ ]
' , . p y f g c r l / = \
a o e u i d h t n s -
; q j k x b m w v z
Note: if you have a MS Natural keyboard or similar you'll have to hit the 6 with your left index finger, but c'est la vie.
check out this guy's blog entry for a picture one might modify.
http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/CommentVie
(hmm... maybe i should copyright and or trademark this split keyboard image idea