This sort of place is exactly the sort of reason I think, if we find life elsewhere in the universe (intelligent or otherwise) then it won't have to be on a planet that looks exactly like Earth and at roughly 1 AU from its local star. Here we have a moon that gives off heat, at a very large distance from its sun. There is no reason for us to be arrogant enough to assume that life can only exist on a place that looks identical to our place. This really bugs me, when I see people say "life can't exist there, that planet is twice Earth's distance from its star..." and rubbish like that. Aarrgghh !
Part of the problem is that the UK Govt seems to assume that private businesses will be happy - in difficult market conditions - to be an effective cheap/free police force for them to monitor people. Given conflicting legislation coming out of both the EU and UK Govt's, it is unlikely that this would be welcomed by UK businesses.
Wow, I didn't realise that it costs thousands of dollars to check out a patent. So what do those guys who make "joke" patents do, like the guy who patented how to sit on a swing, or the patent on how to tie your shoelaces and crap like that, do people really spend $5000 just to show that the Patent Office misses daft patent applications ? Presumeably *they* (the silly patent people) can do it cheaply ?
You really would think that baseball, of all sports, could do with some good publicity, what with all the strikes going on. Shooting yourself in the foot all the time will only drive away those casual fans, and hence revenue. Deary, deary me.
These competing visions are currently duking it out at the FCC under open-access proceedings. So the future of the Internet is hanging in the balance.
For those of us not under the control of the FCC, we may beg to differ that this will decide the whole internet - there may be something that can be added to the internet by the rest of the world, perhaps ?
...Scott Culp, manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center said that the SSL flaw doesn't affect any other application outside Internet Explorer and that it's a client-side issue only.
"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"
The way my company avoids bankruptcy is simple - we have a proper business model, one based one making a profit on everything we do, rather than burying ourselves under a mountain of debt in the hope that one day we might escape by having a IPO or writing off debt as equity, or fiddling the books, or anything else. Just price your goods/services to make a profit and the rest should work.
...welcome to the end of the free Internet, if it ever really existed. Life sentences for people who criticise the state ? It can't be too far away.
Bugs I haven't laughed at...
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 0, Interesting
It's nice to think of bugs that can make us smile, but I was shook up by one bug in hardware, the infamous Intel Pentium f00f bug. This caused calculations to go wrong, sometimes. Not often, quite rarely, but sometimes.
Now, my job (or anyway, part of it) was to design programs that ran calculations to calculate the risk of a serious (fatal) genetic disease being inherited by an unborn from its mother. For some serious diseases, the hospital I worked at offered abortions for those mothers, if they wished. Whatever your views on such terminations, I made damned sure my code was clean and as bug free as I could make it. Then, I come across Usenet messages that the Pentiums I am using have a floating point bug. This is when such bugs become - literally - life or death problems for users. I believe that we were never effected (we reacted quickly and ran on 486's until we found that the cpu's we had were bug free), but it is a sobering lesson.
Random thought - previously a lot of the local box builders could build kit and sell them without an OS installed, thereby saving a few MS bucks, as they knew their customers would just borrow a Win98 cd and install that. Now that MS's registration scheme is more fancy, and should lock some users out from installing WinXP all over the place (though not Win98 of course), will we see more local places under MS's grip and installing kosher copies of WinXP (or whatever) or will that cause people to look at other OS's ?
One point I think a lot of people are making on this thread is that we can fix most stuff ourselves, and we will tolerate the downtime of having a box built by some random Joe rather than HP/Dell/Compaq/etc - what you miss is that if you are in a bank or other corporate shop, and your user is earning 100k a year, it ain't worth the company's while to shave a few pennies off to get spotty support. They *need* the good support and will be *happy* to pay for it. To them it does make sense.
I have no problem with PDAs and fancy calculators in Computer exams, but for Maths exams you should be able to use graph paper and a pencil.
The exam is supposed to be a test of your mind, not of your IT skills.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't do work - I'm a manager.
Sorry, I needed that rant.
Part of the problem is that the UK Govt seems to assume that private businesses will be happy - in difficult market conditions - to be an effective cheap/free police force for them to monitor people. Given conflicting legislation coming out of both the EU and UK Govt's, it is unlikely that this would be welcomed by UK businesses.
Some more TPC-C benchmarks of big iron kit... found here
Wow, I didn't realise that it costs thousands of dollars to check out a patent. So what do those guys who make "joke" patents do, like the guy who patented how to sit on a swing, or the patent on how to tie your shoelaces and crap like that, do people really spend $5000 just to show that the Patent Office misses daft patent applications ? Presumeably *they* (the silly patent people) can do it cheaply ?
You really would think that baseball, of all sports, could do with some good publicity, what with all the strikes going on. Shooting yourself in the foot all the time will only drive away those casual fans, and hence revenue. Deary, deary me.
For those of us not under the control of the FCC, we may beg to differ that this will decide the whole internet - there may be something that can be added to the internet by the rest of the world, perhaps ?
Glad it's only a client side issue then.
BBC story
The way my company avoids bankruptcy is simple - we have a proper business model, one based one making a profit on everything we do, rather than burying ourselves under a mountain of debt in the hope that one day we might escape by having a IPO or writing off debt as equity, or fiddling the books, or anything else. Just price your goods/services to make a profit and the rest should work.
Repeat after me - *have* *a* *business* *model*
...welcome to the end of the free Internet, if it ever really existed. Life sentences for people who criticise the state ? It can't be too far away.
It's nice to think of bugs that can make us smile, but I was shook up by one bug in hardware, the infamous Intel Pentium f00f bug. This caused calculations to go wrong, sometimes. Not often, quite rarely, but sometimes. Now, my job (or anyway, part of it) was to design programs that ran calculations to calculate the risk of a serious (fatal) genetic disease being inherited by an unborn from its mother. For some serious diseases, the hospital I worked at offered abortions for those mothers, if they wished. Whatever your views on such terminations, I made damned sure my code was clean and as bug free as I could make it. Then, I come across Usenet messages that the Pentiums I am using have a floating point bug. This is when such bugs become - literally - life or death problems for users. I believe that we were never effected (we reacted quickly and ran on 486's until we found that the cpu's we had were bug free), but it is a sobering lesson.
Random thought - previously a lot of the local box builders could build kit and sell them without an OS installed, thereby saving a few MS bucks, as they knew their customers would just borrow a Win98 cd and install that. Now that MS's registration scheme is more fancy, and should lock some users out from installing WinXP all over the place (though not Win98 of course), will we see more local places under MS's grip and installing kosher copies of WinXP (or whatever) or will that cause people to look at other OS's ?
One point I think a lot of people are making on this thread is that we can fix most stuff ourselves, and we will tolerate the downtime of having a box built by some random Joe rather than HP/Dell/Compaq/etc - what you miss is that if you are in a bank or other corporate shop, and your user is earning 100k a year, it ain't worth the company's while to shave a few pennies off to get spotty support. They *need* the good support and will be *happy* to pay for it. To them it does make sense.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those... ...oh.
I have no problem with PDAs and fancy calculators in Computer exams, but for Maths exams you should be able to use graph paper and a pencil. The exam is supposed to be a test of your mind, not of your IT skills.