Yep, I work for a hosting company, and I wish to emphasize your point that a lot of customers are running old apps held together by spit and baling wire that won't work on PHP5. And if we tell those customers to get with the program and fix their shit, they will just go find someone who will give them PHP4.
Another problem is that RHEL3 and RHEL4 - which are still, by a wide margin, the most common versions out there - don't support PHP5. They support it in the sense that RPMs exist and you can install them, but RedHat won't manage the patches for you. When you have literally thousands of servers to keep patched, as we do, that's a very, very big deal. We would basically have to bring in a team of two or three people to do nothing but maintain up-to-date PHP RPMs and do QA on them. Even if you assume those people make only $40k a year, that means that our cost to offer PHP5 for RHEL3 and 4 would be $80k+ a year. Look at it that way and you'll start to see why very few big hosting companies want to offer PHP5.
You can do way better than that with PostgreSQL, at least, and I suspect with MySQL as well. I wrote a benchmark similar to yours, but a good bit more complex. I had two tables, one of which was seeded and another which was populated by the benchmark. The benchmark table had six columns (int, timestamp, 4x bigint), a primary key (int + timestamp), four check constraints (on the bigints), a foreign key constraint (int, to the seeded table), and two indexes (one int, one timestamp). I would do a commit every 75k rows, with 24 such commits per iteration and 30 passes per benchmark run, so 54 million rows total. I also used a thread pool, and there are two reasons for that. First, some amount of parallelism improves DB performance. Second, it more accurately simulated our predicted usage patterns of the database. We ran my benchmark against PSQL and IBM DB2.
The results were interesting (at least, I thought they were). First, PSQL can only handle about 10 threads doing work at once. Past about 10 threads, the DB completely falls apart. DB2, however, could handle more busy threads than Linux could, with a very gradual (and linear) degradation in performance past about 25 threads. I stopped testing at 100 threads. Second, PSQL's inserts per second (IPS) rate cut in half by the end of the bechmark. DB2 followed a similar trend until about 5 million rows, at which point IPS went up to where it started and stayed there without moving. Third, DB2 was I/O-bound, whereas PSQL was CPU-bound. I suspect it's why DB2 was able to handle an order of magnitude greater concurrency: more threads just meant the CPUs had something to do while waiting on the disks. However, it does mean that PSQL might do better with faster CPUs, whereas DB2 would not (it'd just be able to handle more threads).
And the numbers: DB2 averaged 1100 IPS, PSQL 600. Note that for the first million rows or so PSQL was faster: it just eventually dropped down to ~400 IPS after ten million rows or so, killing the average. Of course, since this table would never have fewer than 54M rows - actually, it would typically have 160M - the IPS I got at the end was the one that mattered. Also, this was on a pretty weak server, at least for this kind of workload. With more (and faster) cores, more memory, and more spindles, I'm pretty sure you could increase those numbers by 50% or more. With tuning, perhaps that much again.
The biggest problem with "competition" in healthcare is that it's so fucked up by half-assery. For example, if you walk into an ER with a life-threatening illness, you're going to get treatment whether you can pay for it or not: it's the law. That puts the hospital in a bind because your insurance, assuming you have it, can simply refuse to pay and the hospital has zero leverage. They can't refuse to treat you because they already have. They can't refuse to treat the insurer's other clients, because the law requires them to treat them no matter what. And so the hospital is in the position of being forced to accept whatever pathetic amount the insurance company offers them.
There are also de facto price controls in the form of Medicare. It doesn't matter if you're on Medicare or not, your base price of healthcare is what the government would pay out for it if you were. It's where insurance companies start on their negotiations and they usually end up with something like "Medicare minus 20%." If you pay yourself - i.e. you have no insurance - your rates are again based around Medicare (usually it's "Medicare plus 50%" or similar though). Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem - and you can ask any doctor to confirm this - is that the rates allowed by Medicare have no relationship to actual costs of providing the healthcare. One procedure might cost $15,000, but Medicare will only pay for $3,000; another procedure might cost just $500, but Medicare will pay for $5,000. This forces health providers into the situation of having to overcharge dramatically for simple procedures in order to subsidize the complicated ones where they lose a ton of money. The same distortion affects the type of coverage your private insurance company will give you.
I am generally on the libertarian, deregulate-everything side of the ocean. But in this case - going back to the original topic - I'm actually excited about what Massachusetts is doing. I'm a big fan of the States-as-laboratories-for-the-nation idea. If Mass. does this and makes it work, other States will follow suit. They will learn from each others' mistakes and successes and we'll end up with something better as a result. Eventually, the Feds can do some mild regulation to bring the States' offerings into alignment where it makes sense (so that it's not a huge burden to live in one State but work in another, for example). Or maybe, if enough States get on board - like, three quarters of them - the Feds can take over the whole thing and impose it on the entire country.
And if it turns out that Mass.'s efforts result in total failure, well, we'll have learned something from that too. Unfortunately, States can't really try regulating healthcare less, because all the regulation comes from the Feds. But maybe, if individual States keep trying (and failing) to socialize healthcare, maybe Washington will figure out that it's the problem. (Okay, I passed beyond optimism and into insanity with that last statement there. A man can dream, though.)
This SCOTUS ruling means that Lenovo can step in and force your shop to raise the price to a controlled minimum value.
No, that's not what it means at all. All this ruling means is that Lenovo (for example) can put price floors in sale contracts. So your shop goes to buy 20 new Lenovo laptops, there might be a new section in there saying you can't sell the laptops for less than $500. If you don't like it, go buy some Dell laptops instead. Now Lenovo and Dell might conspire to set the same price floor, but that's already illegal (it's collusion).
The reality is that this isn't going to change much. First of all, it doesn't serve manufacturers' interests to drive their resellers into bankruptcy by setting the floor so high that nobody can make any sales. Second, there is usually a de facto floor already for resellers: the price they paid for the product in the first place. Sooner or later, you need to sell the product for more than you paid for it, or you'll go bust. Third, smaller shops tend to renegotiate their contracts more often, because they move less inventory and have less space to store it. A small shop isn't likely to sell more than 100 laptops a year, for example. And for technology-related products in particular, the field just moves too fast to have long-term contracts. I suppose you could make a five-year contract, but after two years it's very unlikely any resellers will be buying anything under that contract, because the product is too old to sell any more.
The main area where this is useful is to combat "dumping," which is why I'm surprised that Slashdot is pretty uniformly against this ruling. A Best Buy can roll into a new neighborhood and sell everything in its inventory for pennies on the dollar, losing millions of dollars but driving any competition right out of business. Then they can jack their prices back up again. By allowing manufacturers to set price floors, that can be easily prevented. Tell a reseller that they can sell a product for no less than 100% of the manufacturer's cost, except for sales not to exceed x days per year or y% of total inventory, unless the manufacturer gives written consent in advance. Voila, you can have sales, and there's competition on several levels (between different resellers with the same contract terms, and between resellers trying to get better terms from the manufacturer).
Of course, we'll have to see how it really turns out. Maybe in five years I'll be eating my hat. But I don't think so.
screen: worked, but sometimes switches to 1024x768 when waking from sleep
Yeah, I'm not 100% sure what the problem is, but I encountered it with a Dell and XP as well. My workaround was to lock the screen first. The login screen after waking may be in the wrong res, but after entering your password, Windows will restore the correct resolution. It only happened to me when I suspended the laptop by closing the lid, though. My suspicion is that when the lid's closed, the graphics card is turned off, then Windows can't query it for its resolution and falls back to some sort of default.
volume buttons: worked, except the "mute" button mutes but doesn't unmute (the "volume up" button works fine for that, however)
This is a "feature," meaning it's the intended behavior. If you were to run XP with the Lenovo drivers, the behavior would be the same. You use the volume buttons to unmute. It sounds silly, but it means you can always hit the mute button and know that the laptop will be muted afterwards. Makes sense for a business laptop, which all Thinkpads are, first and foremost.
fingerprint scanner: probably doesn't work, but haven't looked into it
The difference here is that you're going to java.com, whereas the GP is going to java.sun.com (which is the first two hits on Google if you search for "java"). Incidentally, I never knew java.com existed until now: at some point I Googled for "java" when I needed a JRE, and once I somehow navigated the labyrinthine recesses of sun.java.com to download what I wanted - seriously, it's reminiscent of getting the free RealPlayer - I just bookmarked that page.
Yeah, the absurdly long kernel command lines in Linux really bug me. It's a symptom of the suckiness that is the PC BIOS, so I'm not really blaming the Linux people, but there are better solutions and have been for years. The FreeBSD loader, for instance, is capable of loading the kernel and any modules required to bootstrap the system, reading configuration files, and running Forth (!) scripts. Such a loader would completely eliminate the need for initrds on nearly all systems[1] without sacrificing any power. You could also emulate Openboot or EFI - or more realistically a subset of them - using the PC BIOS to prepare for the future.
[1] initrd is a really awesome feature and it shouldn't go away. But it's massive overkill the way it's typically used, which is to load modules required to mount the root filesystem.
Sure, too many mistakes make something unreadable and destroy an author's ethos, but think claiming [sic, emphasis added] that switching "lose" and "loose" signifies a "not-thinking-clearly" problem
I had to read that sentence three times before it made any sense to me at all. I'm not making fun of you. I'm not even criticizing your apparent lack of proofreading. Comments are closer to casual conversation than essays: nobody expects perfection. But if I submit a story that I want to be shown on the front page of a website that gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day, I'm damn well going to read my submission over a few times.
I have to say, though, I do think it's a little nuts that literally every comment on this story I've read so far is about the spelling error (or tangents of same). I guess all the Slashdotters who aren't spelling Nazis are out enjoying themselves on this fine Friday night?
You might have better luck looking at server motherboards. I know that most Supermicros show POST codes so if the machine keeps hanging mid-POST you can look up what it was testing and fix it. Tyan's motherboards have the same feature, I think. IBM's servers have Light Path Diagnostics (LPD) which is the same thing but includes lights inside the chassis for when you don't even get video. So if you've got a bad stick of RAM, you can pop the case and a LED will be lit next to the faulted DIMM.
Of course, you can't buy just an IBM motherboard, but you can buy Supermicro and Tyan motherboards. With PCI-E catching on in the server market, you should even be able to put in a real video card and use it as a desktop. Just be prepared to spend $250 for the motherboard alone.
Re:Wow, I feel old
on
Define - /etc?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
# uname SunOS # ls -l/etc/init lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Feb 4 11:24/etc/init ->../sbin/init
I suspect that if you checked an older version like Solaris 5.6 (or 6 or 2.6 or whatever the fuck they called that version), you'd find that init is actually located in etc and it's sbin that has the symlink. Historically, Unix has put a lot of binaries in/etc, which certainly lends support to the "et cetera" explanation.
The fastest way to make this system really complicated is go with dynamic parking spot sizes. Then you'd need to figure out the dimensions of every car being parked and remember them, as well as periodically reorder vehicles to reclaim "dead" space. ("The parking garage is getting slow, we'd better run defrag!") This would be a really, really neat system, but it'd have to be perfect or the robot would slam cars into each other if it guessed their sizes wrong. And quite aside from the cost to repair the damaged vehicles (and probably the damaged robot as well), I'd be worried about some drunk kids riding in their cars as they're being parked (hell, I'm sober and I think it'd be pretty cool) and getting decapitated or something. Imagine the lawsuits coming from that one.
You could also make the robots somewhat smart, like we do with elevators, and have them reposition cars intelligently based on when they are statistically more likely to be reclaimed. (At work, the parking garage elevators "park" at the 3rd floor at 7am, then gradually move up toward the 10th floor as the garage fills up.) So statistics may show that most people fall into one of two groups: people who park for about an hour, and people who park for about four hours. The robots could then, during idle time, find the cars which are likely to be recalled soon and move them closer to the entrance. This isn't just a convenience thing: if the robot is fetching a car, it can't put one in the garage, so the faster you can get cars in and out, the more cars (over the course of a day) you can store (and the more money you can make). This would be especially crucial for local events like sports games, where 20k people are all going to be getting their cars at the same time.
Contains the phrase (in Italian), ``Il fumo uccide.'' Translated into English, that reads, ``Smoking kills.'' Can you imagine something that bold and straightforward being printed on a carton sold in the U.S.?
The first price is upgrading from "unlimited" to "enterprise" and costs 100 euros. The second price is upgrading from "single server" to "enterprise" and costs 175 euros.
That said... +4, really? I can understand how someone can misread the pricing structure since it's a little confusing. But how can at least two people mod this up when simply reading the post they're moderating would show them he just misread the stuff he quoted? You don't even have to follow any links, the information's all there.
Well, I've made my gripe, carry on. To make this a little more on-topic: I use Kupu because it comes with Plone and is pretty nice.
Until we can eliminate our dependence on fossil fuel to generate power, electric cars are actually worse for the environment than gasoline cars.
True enough, or at least it may be, when all's considered. The advantage of electric cars, though, is that you can change how the power is generated without having to change all the cars. Right now, most of the power would probably come from coal or nuclear, but five or ten years from now it may come from someplace else (solar, wind, something new maybe). You wouldn't have to change the design of your cars at all, since as long as they get AC at the right voltage they're happy. Obviously you need to change the power plants themselves to take advantage of new technology, but it's easier to change a few thousand power plants than a few hundred million cars. It's also, of course, easier to add new anti-pollution technology to a few thousand smokestacks than a few hundred million tailpipes. Cheaper too, and I suspect more efficient since most power plants are better-maintained than most cars.
Is online gambling really that different from regular gambling?
Yes, because an online casino may be in another country, where we have zero legal authority to regulate it. If it's domestic, then states, towns, counties, or the entire country can decide whether to allow gambling. (People can always travel to a casino, but the less convenient such travel is, the less likely people are to do it.) We can also do things like impose regulations to prohibit casino-side cheating and so on.
Now in reality, a ban on Internet gambling at foreign casinos is going to be useless (worse than useless, if it gets us in trouble with the WTO). We don't have a Great Firewall, and even if we did, we all know how ineffective China's is. And besides, making gambling inconvenient isn't going to affect people with gambling addiction - they'll go wherever they need to in order to get their fix - it'll just affect casual gamblers looking to have a night of fun. So even if this ban worked exactly as intended, I don't think it'd serve the great social good its proponents think it will.
But still, there is a valid and important distinction between the two types.
In all seriousness though, how can the Earth being an axial dipole (2 magnetic poles along a single axis) hundreds of millions of years ago suggest an Earth that was covered by up to a kilometer of ice? The Earth is currently in the same magnetic configuration, and there's certainly no indication of an impending super ice age.
Well, there may be a feedback loop of some kind. That is, Earth gets hotter, which triggers some reaction which makes it hotter still, and so on. At a certain point such a reaction becomes unsustainable, and usually feedback loops end rather spectacularly, so it could result in a sudden and dramatic shift to the other end. Such a feedback loop might be indicated by increasingly severe shifts between one extreme and another, which is exactly what climate change is supposed to be. So it's possible that we're experiencing the change already.
I should make it clear, however, that I'm no climatologist. I'm just putting forth an answer to your question which is logically (though perhaps not scientifically) possible. I should also mention that 600 million years is a long time even for our planet, and that its environment (in the "situation" sense, not the "wildlife" sense) may have changed to such an extent in that time that such a change might be radically different or even impossible now.
But would you rather have them as a parasite or Microsoft to build its own set of Parasitic software.
I don't think it makes business sense for them to use AV as a long-term patch. It takes a lot of time and energy to keep AV signatures up-to-date, which means it costs money. If MS intends to give away or sell below cost its AV software - which it would almost have to do in order to drive McAfee et al. out of business - they could be losing a whole lot of money. And of course, if MS eventually slacks off (as they did with IE) or starts charging big bucks for new signatures, competition will spring back up. Symantec, for example, is a fairly diversified company: I don't see them going broke even if NAV never sells another copy. (They own Veritas now, remember.)
The best use of AV software for MS is as a short-term patch until they can release a real one. Say a zero-day exploit of Outlook is discovered. A new signature can be rolled out in a few days to their AV client, giving them a little breathing room to develop a patch for Outlook and test it to make sure it doesn't break anything else. This way, MS would only have to target the very latest or most serious malware. I expect that would make maintenance of an AV system much easier and cheaper.
Of course, it may not happen that way. This is MS we're talking about. They might be doing this just because it offends their sensibilities to see someone else making money.
It happens in the US as well, though I'm not sure how common it is. (The nature of the thing makes it really prone to urban legends.) The ones you hear about are gangs, who use guns rather than stones. They'll also call 911 and report fake medical emergencies to lure ambulances. Since most emergency crews show up with a police escort - at least partially for just this reason; I'm told that paramedics are instructed not to get out of the ambulance until the cops arrive - they also order pizza or Chinese. Usually in the latter case the result is "just" a beating and/or mugging.
I actually strongly sympathize with the gubmint here. Because they realize the information serves a legitimate public interest, they're not trying to take it away. They're just trying to ensure it's not abused to endanger the lives of public servants, who in some cases live pretty dangerous lives already. I don't think the solution the government came up with is a good one (for obvious technical reasons), but I think it's important that everyone understand there is a serious concern here.
Because songs aren't bought using money. You use money to buy Microsoft Points, or something with a similarly retarded name, and then use those points to buy songs. The current price is a buck for 80 points, and songs cost 79 points. So each point costs 1.25 cents, and 79 points works out to 98.75 cents. Due to rounding, if you buy 1 or 2 songs you pay the same as in ITMS, and past that you pay a very small amount less (if you buy 100 songs you save a whole quarter).
I don't think that means what you think it means. If it's a hardware driver, it's got some piece in the kernel. That doesn't just go for Windows, it applies to Linux and everything else too.
Enabling executeable content by default in Outlook Express
Just because it ships with Windows, that doesn't make it part of the operating system. I guess we're arguing over semantics here, so I'll leave it at that.
No real super-user
Windows isn't supposed to have a superuser, not the way you mean it (ignores all access controls). Windows is meant to function more like SELinux, where the OS can impose restrictions not even the superuser can bypass. The problem is really one of implementation, not design.
Which brings me to my primary complaint about Windows: It could be pretty damn good, if they'd take a break from adding features and finish the ones they already started. That's, I think, why Win2k was so good, at least by Windows standards: from the perspective of a desktop user, all they did was finish what they started in NT 4.0. The net result is that everything was polished, remarkably stable, and MS very ably accomplished its goal of mergin the 9x and NT lines, producing something that was better than both of them.
Specifically, what was it exactly that made Target's website non-compliant?
Check out Target's site. On the first screen, there are four words of text: "Sign In" and "New Guest." The stuff that looks like text really isn't, it's been saved as GIFs. There's also a big ol' Flash thing there. The second screen has actual text: the bulleted items are, even though the menu on the left isn't. Also the navigation panel at the bottom uses text. You can verify this by trying to select the "text." (For links, just make sure to move the pointer over a different link before you let go of the mouse button.) If you can select individual letters, it's actual text.
I'm definitely impressed by Target's committment to stupidity. Most people wouldn't bother taking the extra time to turn plain, unenhanced Tahoma text into a bunch of 1.5KB GIFs. I mean, it makes the site 500 times bigger, it makes the site unusable by people with vision problems, it takes probably 10 times longer since you have to do it in Photoshop, and I bet they had to spend hours fiddling with the code to make everything line up properly. Most people would bail when they realized precisely how stupid an idea this was, but not Target! When they were done, they just wanted to know what stupid thing they could do next! "Hey guys, let's challenge this lawsuit that we patently have no chance whatsoever of winning! We're still going to lose, but now it'll cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and a bunch of bad publicity!"
The traditional phrase is, "innocent until proven guilty," which implies that you may never be proven guilty. Your turn of phrase, "innocent before proven guilty," implies that you're going to be proven guilty, but you're currently innocent.
I disagree, in part. I feel that both phrasings suggest the eventual determination of guilt. "How long am I innocent?" "Until we prove you're guilty." In other words, you're going to be found guilty eventually, it's only a matter of time. And for the phrase you dislike: "When am I innocent?" "You're innocent before we prove you're guilty." Same deal here: you're going to be found guilty, they just don't know when yet.
A phrasing more to your liking might be "Innocent unless proven guilty." There's no implication that you will ever be proven guilty of anything, and in fact that "unless" suggests to me that such proof will never happen. I mean, most of the time I hear "unless" in everyday speech it's right before someone describes something that we both know will never happen: "I can't get this to you before Friday unless I invent a time machine and prevent my boss from ever being born."
I know it's very popular on Slashdot to go all 1984 when the topic is language, and I'm not saying that's always wrong. But it's not always right, either. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes people can use different words to mean exactly the same thing.
The funny thing about that is that what most people term Pork Spending, IS doing something for the local people and businesses.
Which is the problem with pork: it does something for the local people and businesses.
The money ought to come from Alaska's state budget. I hope that's obvious. But it's a lot harder to find $223 million in a state's budget than in the fed's. Pretty much the only way Alaska could come up with that money is to increase taxes. There's no way that Alaskan taxpayers would approve a tax increase for such a stupid cause. So instead the politicians try to get the money from the fed's budget, where $223 mil is a drop in the bucket. It's essentially "free money" for a state like Alaska: of that entire sum, I'd be surprised if more than $1 mil came from Alaska due to its low population and relatively small economy.
Remember also that if all pork were eliminated, the feds could lower the income tax rate and not "lose money" (i.e. the deficit wouldn't increase). States could then institute or increase local income taxes without affecting the overall tax burden at all. The added revenues could be directed to improving schools, paying cops better wages, fixing the roads, etc. And because it's local politicians making those decisions and not Congressmen who've never even been to Alaska, the politicians can be more easily held accountable. (If a Senator from Massachusetts votes to reduce federal funding to the state of Alaska, there's absolutely nothing that Alaskan voters can do about it.)
I do get the impression that your tongue was at least partly in your cheek, but I wanted to make sure folks know why pork is bad. If you look at the list of pork projects, none of the seem bad... until you start to wonder why a taxpayer in Minnesota should have to pay to maintain local roads in Pennsylvania.
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Yep, I work for a hosting company, and I wish to emphasize your point that a lot of customers are running old apps held together by spit and baling wire that won't work on PHP5. And if we tell those customers to get with the program and fix their shit, they will just go find someone who will give them PHP4.
Another problem is that RHEL3 and RHEL4 - which are still, by a wide margin, the most common versions out there - don't support PHP5. They support it in the sense that RPMs exist and you can install them, but RedHat won't manage the patches for you. When you have literally thousands of servers to keep patched, as we do, that's a very, very big deal. We would basically have to bring in a team of two or three people to do nothing but maintain up-to-date PHP RPMs and do QA on them. Even if you assume those people make only $40k a year, that means that our cost to offer PHP5 for RHEL3 and 4 would be $80k+ a year. Look at it that way and you'll start to see why very few big hosting companies want to offer PHP5.
You can do way better than that with PostgreSQL, at least, and I suspect with MySQL as well. I wrote a benchmark similar to yours, but a good bit more complex. I had two tables, one of which was seeded and another which was populated by the benchmark. The benchmark table had six columns (int, timestamp, 4x bigint), a primary key (int + timestamp), four check constraints (on the bigints), a foreign key constraint (int, to the seeded table), and two indexes (one int, one timestamp). I would do a commit every 75k rows, with 24 such commits per iteration and 30 passes per benchmark run, so 54 million rows total. I also used a thread pool, and there are two reasons for that. First, some amount of parallelism improves DB performance. Second, it more accurately simulated our predicted usage patterns of the database. We ran my benchmark against PSQL and IBM DB2.
The results were interesting (at least, I thought they were). First, PSQL can only handle about 10 threads doing work at once. Past about 10 threads, the DB completely falls apart. DB2, however, could handle more busy threads than Linux could, with a very gradual (and linear) degradation in performance past about 25 threads. I stopped testing at 100 threads. Second, PSQL's inserts per second (IPS) rate cut in half by the end of the bechmark. DB2 followed a similar trend until about 5 million rows, at which point IPS went up to where it started and stayed there without moving. Third, DB2 was I/O-bound, whereas PSQL was CPU-bound. I suspect it's why DB2 was able to handle an order of magnitude greater concurrency: more threads just meant the CPUs had something to do while waiting on the disks. However, it does mean that PSQL might do better with faster CPUs, whereas DB2 would not (it'd just be able to handle more threads).
And the numbers: DB2 averaged 1100 IPS, PSQL 600. Note that for the first million rows or so PSQL was faster: it just eventually dropped down to ~400 IPS after ten million rows or so, killing the average. Of course, since this table would never have fewer than 54M rows - actually, it would typically have 160M - the IPS I got at the end was the one that mattered. Also, this was on a pretty weak server, at least for this kind of workload. With more (and faster) cores, more memory, and more spindles, I'm pretty sure you could increase those numbers by 50% or more. With tuning, perhaps that much again.
The biggest problem with "competition" in healthcare is that it's so fucked up by half-assery. For example, if you walk into an ER with a life-threatening illness, you're going to get treatment whether you can pay for it or not: it's the law. That puts the hospital in a bind because your insurance, assuming you have it, can simply refuse to pay and the hospital has zero leverage. They can't refuse to treat you because they already have. They can't refuse to treat the insurer's other clients, because the law requires them to treat them no matter what. And so the hospital is in the position of being forced to accept whatever pathetic amount the insurance company offers them.
There are also de facto price controls in the form of Medicare. It doesn't matter if you're on Medicare or not, your base price of healthcare is what the government would pay out for it if you were. It's where insurance companies start on their negotiations and they usually end up with something like "Medicare minus 20%." If you pay yourself - i.e. you have no insurance - your rates are again based around Medicare (usually it's "Medicare plus 50%" or similar though). Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem - and you can ask any doctor to confirm this - is that the rates allowed by Medicare have no relationship to actual costs of providing the healthcare. One procedure might cost $15,000, but Medicare will only pay for $3,000; another procedure might cost just $500, but Medicare will pay for $5,000. This forces health providers into the situation of having to overcharge dramatically for simple procedures in order to subsidize the complicated ones where they lose a ton of money. The same distortion affects the type of coverage your private insurance company will give you.
I am generally on the libertarian, deregulate-everything side of the ocean. But in this case - going back to the original topic - I'm actually excited about what Massachusetts is doing. I'm a big fan of the States-as-laboratories-for-the-nation idea. If Mass. does this and makes it work, other States will follow suit. They will learn from each others' mistakes and successes and we'll end up with something better as a result. Eventually, the Feds can do some mild regulation to bring the States' offerings into alignment where it makes sense (so that it's not a huge burden to live in one State but work in another, for example). Or maybe, if enough States get on board - like, three quarters of them - the Feds can take over the whole thing and impose it on the entire country.
And if it turns out that Mass.'s efforts result in total failure, well, we'll have learned something from that too. Unfortunately, States can't really try regulating healthcare less, because all the regulation comes from the Feds. But maybe, if individual States keep trying (and failing) to socialize healthcare, maybe Washington will figure out that it's the problem. (Okay, I passed beyond optimism and into insanity with that last statement there. A man can dream, though.)
No, that's not what it means at all. All this ruling means is that Lenovo (for example) can put price floors in sale contracts. So your shop goes to buy 20 new Lenovo laptops, there might be a new section in there saying you can't sell the laptops for less than $500. If you don't like it, go buy some Dell laptops instead. Now Lenovo and Dell might conspire to set the same price floor, but that's already illegal (it's collusion).
The reality is that this isn't going to change much. First of all, it doesn't serve manufacturers' interests to drive their resellers into bankruptcy by setting the floor so high that nobody can make any sales. Second, there is usually a de facto floor already for resellers: the price they paid for the product in the first place. Sooner or later, you need to sell the product for more than you paid for it, or you'll go bust. Third, smaller shops tend to renegotiate their contracts more often, because they move less inventory and have less space to store it. A small shop isn't likely to sell more than 100 laptops a year, for example. And for technology-related products in particular, the field just moves too fast to have long-term contracts. I suppose you could make a five-year contract, but after two years it's very unlikely any resellers will be buying anything under that contract, because the product is too old to sell any more.
The main area where this is useful is to combat "dumping," which is why I'm surprised that Slashdot is pretty uniformly against this ruling. A Best Buy can roll into a new neighborhood and sell everything in its inventory for pennies on the dollar, losing millions of dollars but driving any competition right out of business. Then they can jack their prices back up again. By allowing manufacturers to set price floors, that can be easily prevented. Tell a reseller that they can sell a product for no less than 100% of the manufacturer's cost, except for sales not to exceed x days per year or y% of total inventory, unless the manufacturer gives written consent in advance. Voila, you can have sales, and there's competition on several levels (between different resellers with the same contract terms, and between resellers trying to get better terms from the manufacturer).
Of course, we'll have to see how it really turns out. Maybe in five years I'll be eating my hat. But I don't think so.
Yeah, I'm not 100% sure what the problem is, but I encountered it with a Dell and XP as well. My workaround was to lock the screen first. The login screen after waking may be in the wrong res, but after entering your password, Windows will restore the correct resolution. It only happened to me when I suspended the laptop by closing the lid, though. My suspicion is that when the lid's closed, the graphics card is turned off, then Windows can't query it for its resolution and falls back to some sort of default.
This is a "feature," meaning it's the intended behavior. If you were to run XP with the Lenovo drivers, the behavior would be the same. You use the volume buttons to unmute. It sounds silly, but it means you can always hit the mute button and know that the laptop will be muted afterwards. Makes sense for a business laptop, which all Thinkpads are, first and foremost.
There's information on getting it to work here, though I haven't tried it. I don't know what it is about me, but for some reason electronics will just not take my fingerprints.
The difference here is that you're going to java.com, whereas the GP is going to java.sun.com (which is the first two hits on Google if you search for "java"). Incidentally, I never knew java.com existed until now: at some point I Googled for "java" when I needed a JRE, and once I somehow navigated the labyrinthine recesses of sun.java.com to download what I wanted - seriously, it's reminiscent of getting the free RealPlayer - I just bookmarked that page.
Yeah, the absurdly long kernel command lines in Linux really bug me. It's a symptom of the suckiness that is the PC BIOS, so I'm not really blaming the Linux people, but there are better solutions and have been for years. The FreeBSD loader, for instance, is capable of loading the kernel and any modules required to bootstrap the system, reading configuration files, and running Forth (!) scripts. Such a loader would completely eliminate the need for initrds on nearly all systems[1] without sacrificing any power. You could also emulate Openboot or EFI - or more realistically a subset of them - using the PC BIOS to prepare for the future.
[1] initrd is a really awesome feature and it shouldn't go away. But it's massive overkill the way it's typically used, which is to load modules required to mount the root filesystem.
Also, the Magician is here.
I had to read that sentence three times before it made any sense to me at all. I'm not making fun of you. I'm not even criticizing your apparent lack of proofreading. Comments are closer to casual conversation than essays: nobody expects perfection. But if I submit a story that I want to be shown on the front page of a website that gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day, I'm damn well going to read my submission over a few times.
I have to say, though, I do think it's a little nuts that literally every comment on this story I've read so far is about the spelling error (or tangents of same). I guess all the Slashdotters who aren't spelling Nazis are out enjoying themselves on this fine Friday night?
You might have better luck looking at server motherboards. I know that most Supermicros show POST codes so if the machine keeps hanging mid-POST you can look up what it was testing and fix it. Tyan's motherboards have the same feature, I think. IBM's servers have Light Path Diagnostics (LPD) which is the same thing but includes lights inside the chassis for when you don't even get video. So if you've got a bad stick of RAM, you can pop the case and a LED will be lit next to the faulted DIMM.
Of course, you can't buy just an IBM motherboard, but you can buy Supermicro and Tyan motherboards. With PCI-E catching on in the server market, you should even be able to put in a real video card and use it as a desktop. Just be prepared to spend $250 for the motherboard alone.
I suspect that if you checked an older version like Solaris 5.6 (or 6 or 2.6 or whatever the fuck they called that version), you'd find that init is actually located in etc and it's sbin that has the symlink. Historically, Unix has put a lot of binaries in /etc, which certainly lends support to the "et cetera" explanation.
The fastest way to make this system really complicated is go with dynamic parking spot sizes. Then you'd need to figure out the dimensions of every car being parked and remember them, as well as periodically reorder vehicles to reclaim "dead" space. ("The parking garage is getting slow, we'd better run defrag!") This would be a really, really neat system, but it'd have to be perfect or the robot would slam cars into each other if it guessed their sizes wrong. And quite aside from the cost to repair the damaged vehicles (and probably the damaged robot as well), I'd be worried about some drunk kids riding in their cars as they're being parked (hell, I'm sober and I think it'd be pretty cool) and getting decapitated or something. Imagine the lawsuits coming from that one.
You could also make the robots somewhat smart, like we do with elevators, and have them reposition cars intelligently based on when they are statistically more likely to be reclaimed. (At work, the parking garage elevators "park" at the 3rd floor at 7am, then gradually move up toward the 10th floor as the garage fills up.) So statistics may show that most people fall into one of two groups: people who park for about an hour, and people who park for about four hours. The robots could then, during idle time, find the cars which are likely to be recalled soon and move them closer to the entrance. This isn't just a convenience thing: if the robot is fetching a car, it can't put one in the garage, so the faster you can get cars in and out, the more cars (over the course of a day) you can store (and the more money you can make). This would be especially crucial for local events like sports games, where 20k people are all going to be getting their cars at the same time.
Yes. Each pack of cigarettes has one of several warnings on it, one of which is "Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy." That's quite straightforward and bold, in my opinion.
The first price is upgrading from "unlimited" to "enterprise" and costs 100 euros. The second price is upgrading from "single server" to "enterprise" and costs 175 euros.
That said... +4, really? I can understand how someone can misread the pricing structure since it's a little confusing. But how can at least two people mod this up when simply reading the post they're moderating would show them he just misread the stuff he quoted? You don't even have to follow any links, the information's all there.
Well, I've made my gripe, carry on. To make this a little more on-topic: I use Kupu because it comes with Plone and is pretty nice.
True enough, or at least it may be, when all's considered. The advantage of electric cars, though, is that you can change how the power is generated without having to change all the cars. Right now, most of the power would probably come from coal or nuclear, but five or ten years from now it may come from someplace else (solar, wind, something new maybe). You wouldn't have to change the design of your cars at all, since as long as they get AC at the right voltage they're happy. Obviously you need to change the power plants themselves to take advantage of new technology, but it's easier to change a few thousand power plants than a few hundred million cars. It's also, of course, easier to add new anti-pollution technology to a few thousand smokestacks than a few hundred million tailpipes. Cheaper too, and I suspect more efficient since most power plants are better-maintained than most cars.
Yes, because an online casino may be in another country, where we have zero legal authority to regulate it. If it's domestic, then states, towns, counties, or the entire country can decide whether to allow gambling. (People can always travel to a casino, but the less convenient such travel is, the less likely people are to do it.) We can also do things like impose regulations to prohibit casino-side cheating and so on.
Now in reality, a ban on Internet gambling at foreign casinos is going to be useless (worse than useless, if it gets us in trouble with the WTO). We don't have a Great Firewall, and even if we did, we all know how ineffective China's is. And besides, making gambling inconvenient isn't going to affect people with gambling addiction - they'll go wherever they need to in order to get their fix - it'll just affect casual gamblers looking to have a night of fun. So even if this ban worked exactly as intended, I don't think it'd serve the great social good its proponents think it will.
But still, there is a valid and important distinction between the two types.
Well, there may be a feedback loop of some kind. That is, Earth gets hotter, which triggers some reaction which makes it hotter still, and so on. At a certain point such a reaction becomes unsustainable, and usually feedback loops end rather spectacularly, so it could result in a sudden and dramatic shift to the other end. Such a feedback loop might be indicated by increasingly severe shifts between one extreme and another, which is exactly what climate change is supposed to be. So it's possible that we're experiencing the change already.
I should make it clear, however, that I'm no climatologist. I'm just putting forth an answer to your question which is logically (though perhaps not scientifically) possible. I should also mention that 600 million years is a long time even for our planet, and that its environment (in the "situation" sense, not the "wildlife" sense) may have changed to such an extent in that time that such a change might be radically different or even impossible now.
I don't think it makes business sense for them to use AV as a long-term patch. It takes a lot of time and energy to keep AV signatures up-to-date, which means it costs money. If MS intends to give away or sell below cost its AV software - which it would almost have to do in order to drive McAfee et al. out of business - they could be losing a whole lot of money. And of course, if MS eventually slacks off (as they did with IE) or starts charging big bucks for new signatures, competition will spring back up. Symantec, for example, is a fairly diversified company: I don't see them going broke even if NAV never sells another copy. (They own Veritas now, remember.)
The best use of AV software for MS is as a short-term patch until they can release a real one. Say a zero-day exploit of Outlook is discovered. A new signature can be rolled out in a few days to their AV client, giving them a little breathing room to develop a patch for Outlook and test it to make sure it doesn't break anything else. This way, MS would only have to target the very latest or most serious malware. I expect that would make maintenance of an AV system much easier and cheaper.
Of course, it may not happen that way. This is MS we're talking about. They might be doing this just because it offends their sensibilities to see someone else making money.
It happens in the US as well, though I'm not sure how common it is. (The nature of the thing makes it really prone to urban legends.) The ones you hear about are gangs, who use guns rather than stones. They'll also call 911 and report fake medical emergencies to lure ambulances. Since most emergency crews show up with a police escort - at least partially for just this reason; I'm told that paramedics are instructed not to get out of the ambulance until the cops arrive - they also order pizza or Chinese. Usually in the latter case the result is "just" a beating and/or mugging.
I actually strongly sympathize with the gubmint here. Because they realize the information serves a legitimate public interest, they're not trying to take it away. They're just trying to ensure it's not abused to endanger the lives of public servants, who in some cases live pretty dangerous lives already. I don't think the solution the government came up with is a good one (for obvious technical reasons), but I think it's important that everyone understand there is a serious concern here.
Because songs aren't bought using money. You use money to buy Microsoft Points, or something with a similarly retarded name, and then use those points to buy songs. The current price is a buck for 80 points, and songs cost 79 points. So each point costs 1.25 cents, and 79 points works out to 98.75 cents. Due to rounding, if you buy 1 or 2 songs you pay the same as in ITMS, and past that you pay a very small amount less (if you buy 100 songs you save a whole quarter).
I don't think that means what you think it means. If it's a hardware driver, it's got some piece in the kernel. That doesn't just go for Windows, it applies to Linux and everything else too.
Just because it ships with Windows, that doesn't make it part of the operating system. I guess we're arguing over semantics here, so I'll leave it at that.
Windows isn't supposed to have a superuser, not the way you mean it (ignores all access controls). Windows is meant to function more like SELinux, where the OS can impose restrictions not even the superuser can bypass. The problem is really one of implementation, not design.
Which brings me to my primary complaint about Windows: It could be pretty damn good, if they'd take a break from adding features and finish the ones they already started. That's, I think, why Win2k was so good, at least by Windows standards: from the perspective of a desktop user, all they did was finish what they started in NT 4.0. The net result is that everything was polished, remarkably stable, and MS very ably accomplished its goal of mergin the 9x and NT lines, producing something that was better than both of them.
Check out Target's site. On the first screen, there are four words of text: "Sign In" and "New Guest." The stuff that looks like text really isn't, it's been saved as GIFs. There's also a big ol' Flash thing there. The second screen has actual text: the bulleted items are, even though the menu on the left isn't. Also the navigation panel at the bottom uses text. You can verify this by trying to select the "text." (For links, just make sure to move the pointer over a different link before you let go of the mouse button.) If you can select individual letters, it's actual text.
I'm definitely impressed by Target's committment to stupidity. Most people wouldn't bother taking the extra time to turn plain, unenhanced Tahoma text into a bunch of 1.5KB GIFs. I mean, it makes the site 500 times bigger, it makes the site unusable by people with vision problems, it takes probably 10 times longer since you have to do it in Photoshop, and I bet they had to spend hours fiddling with the code to make everything line up properly. Most people would bail when they realized precisely how stupid an idea this was, but not Target! When they were done, they just wanted to know what stupid thing they could do next! "Hey guys, let's challenge this lawsuit that we patently have no chance whatsoever of winning! We're still going to lose, but now it'll cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and a bunch of bad publicity!"
I disagree, in part. I feel that both phrasings suggest the eventual determination of guilt. "How long am I innocent?" "Until we prove you're guilty." In other words, you're going to be found guilty eventually, it's only a matter of time. And for the phrase you dislike: "When am I innocent?" "You're innocent before we prove you're guilty." Same deal here: you're going to be found guilty, they just don't know when yet.
A phrasing more to your liking might be "Innocent unless proven guilty." There's no implication that you will ever be proven guilty of anything, and in fact that "unless" suggests to me that such proof will never happen. I mean, most of the time I hear "unless" in everyday speech it's right before someone describes something that we both know will never happen: "I can't get this to you before Friday unless I invent a time machine and prevent my boss from ever being born."
I know it's very popular on Slashdot to go all 1984 when the topic is language, and I'm not saying that's always wrong. But it's not always right, either. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes people can use different words to mean exactly the same thing.
Which is the problem with pork: it does something for the local people and businesses.
The money ought to come from Alaska's state budget. I hope that's obvious. But it's a lot harder to find $223 million in a state's budget than in the fed's. Pretty much the only way Alaska could come up with that money is to increase taxes. There's no way that Alaskan taxpayers would approve a tax increase for such a stupid cause. So instead the politicians try to get the money from the fed's budget, where $223 mil is a drop in the bucket. It's essentially "free money" for a state like Alaska: of that entire sum, I'd be surprised if more than $1 mil came from Alaska due to its low population and relatively small economy.
Remember also that if all pork were eliminated, the feds could lower the income tax rate and not "lose money" (i.e. the deficit wouldn't increase). States could then institute or increase local income taxes without affecting the overall tax burden at all. The added revenues could be directed to improving schools, paying cops better wages, fixing the roads, etc. And because it's local politicians making those decisions and not Congressmen who've never even been to Alaska, the politicians can be more easily held accountable. (If a Senator from Massachusetts votes to reduce federal funding to the state of Alaska, there's absolutely nothing that Alaskan voters can do about it.)
I do get the impression that your tongue was at least partly in your cheek, but I wanted to make sure folks know why pork is bad. If you look at the list of pork projects, none of the seem bad... until you start to wonder why a taxpayer in Minnesota should have to pay to maintain local roads in Pennsylvania.
Behold rde, the new BadAnalogyGuy!