"I see here you used to go by the alias, 'p00nhunter.' Now, can you please tell this committee what exactly a p00n is? And why you were hunting them?"
That depends. If you're older than the Senator, then he probably has a similar history: "Well, Senator, if you want to know why I was called p00nhunter then you should probably ask yo' mamma."
If you're younger than the Senatory in question, you can play to his ignorance: "Well, Senator Stevens, they're small, scaly creatures which inhabit the darkest and dampest tubes of the Internet. Few fourteen-year-olds had the boldness to probe the depths in search of the wily p00n; I think I was precocious."
If you can't make 30 seconds of someone typing look interesting, just show us five seconds and let our brains fill in the gaps, don't turn his wordprocessor into an environment that does advanced speech recognition and renders his musings as 3D representations.
Your criticism would be entirely apt if the article's complaint (and my subsequent comment) had anything to do with speech recognition or silly 3D rendering.
8. Online chats always display each character as its typed.
...each character of a message is displayed as its typed...the typing is always faster than fluent touch-typists can manage and no mistakes are ever made - not once is the backspace key pressed...No IM system in popular use does this...
I was using ICQ back in 1998, and it had the option of displaying each chat character as it was typed. It meant you could express more complex thoughts, without requiring the other person to sit and wait patiently for you to develop a whole paragraph. It let the other guy step in and say 'I see where you're going, but let me stop you there...'. It opened up opportunities for dramatic timing and deliberate use of backspacing for comedic effect. It was more 'live' than a one-line-at-a-time chat modality, despite its warts. While this style of online chat may not be particularly popular today, it was (and still is) readily available.
In real-life telephone conversations, you don't get to review each sentence before it goes out over the wire; if you choose the wrong word you just have to live with it.
To the other point, I just have to say -- what? People can perform tasks flawlessly in movies? It turns out that unless required for dramatic effect (as a somewhat-lazy shorthand to convey nervousness or poorly-concealed deception), characters always speak in clear, perfect setences and never use the word "um". Their shoelaces are always tied, their hair is always perfect, and they never miss the bus unless their character is required to be unlucky or miserable.
People in movies seldom need to visit the washroom, and then only to have private conversations -- never to defecate, except as a route to teen-movie fart jokes.
Movies are a projection of reality, not an exact duplicate. People tend to do non-visually-arresting and plot-irrelevant things faster or behind the scenes. Watching someone make typos for two hours isn't my idea of a good time.
Now, whether or not you truncate the decimal or round it, I'm not sure. In this case it doesn't matter though, it comes to 137 either way.
Nope, it doesn't. The correct answer is 138 votes to pass. As you noted, 206 times 2/3 is 137 plus one third. 137 votes is less than two thirds of 206; it therefore doesn't pass either.
(If the supermajority calculation is confusing, consider a conceptually-easier simple majority (1/2) case. In the hypothetical case of 101 voters, a pass is 51 votes - being the first integer greater than 50.5 - not 50.)
I'm not sure why you figure the threshold for 'worthwhile' is 1 year to recover initial capital
Why do you believe I make that assumption? I was simply offering order-of-magnitude estimates for each of the values; as they're in the same ballpark, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the payback period might be acceptable.
It's all about cost: how much does the device cost, and how much maintenance it requires, this translates into a cost per Kwh, which tells us if it is a good idea; but I guess it'll probably be more expensive than wind power.
Well, the article claims 2 kW output. Let's figure cows are walking 16 hours per day (two shifts); that's 32 kWh per day (most optimistic assumption). If it's sold back to the grid at ten cents per kWh, we're looking at 3.20 USD per day, or about 1000 USD per year.
Now, those are some optimistic assumptions (about per-day use, and electricity rates) but not totally ridiculous. If you can make a cow treadmill for a thousand bucks (Amazon quotes prices of four hunded to a couple thousand dollars for people treadmills) then you might have something worthwhile there.
That said, I don't know what the maintenance will run you, nor how much it will cost to bring feed to the now non-grazing cattle....
... the cashier's behaviour was inappropriate. That's not how to treat a costumer.
Yeah, but if I were to file a lawsuit every time a minimum-wage slave in a crappy job wasn't as chipper and cheery (or, even worse, showed a hint of a sense of humor) -- particularly if I was going to moan about events that took place over the last six years -- I'd never have time to do anything else with my life.
I'm assuming that the cashier in question is already finished high school, is out of college, and is busy doing something productive with his life. It's a bit late to be giving the old Customer Service 101 lessons now.
Think about it, who would you rather have, the guy with 10 years Software Engineering experience in the field or the one just fresh out of university with a Maths Doctorate
I know the snap answer my gut wants to give, and I know the answer that the parent is looking for - and those two answers are the same - but something still gives me pause.
It occurs to me that the fellow with the math PhD just spent the last four to seven years of his life learning how to use novel tools to solve difficult problems, and the fact that he managed to write a thesis suggests that he actually did learn a little bit about how to work in a self-directed manner on a long-term project.
It also occurs to me to wonder why the guy with ten years of work experience is willing to work for the same money as the guy who's fresh out of school. Did I write the job description poorly, are someone's expectations poorly calibrated, did a local company go bankrupt, or is the guy with ten years' experience looking at entry-level positions for a less-than-flattering reason?
Realistically, there are some projects that I would want the PhD on, and some for which I would prefer the highly-experienced software engineer.
“if we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [his initial 2050 global population projection of 9-billion] by perhaps about 10 to 15 percent.”
Sure, I suppose that could mean that he advocates surreptitiously sterilizing Third-World women under the guise of providing health services.
But what it probably means is that he believes societies with better access to health care have a greater fraction of children survive to adulthood and see far, far, far fewer of their women die in childbirth. Access to birth control permits women to space out their children more, with benefits to the health of mother and child. Those societies (like, say, the villianous dystopias of Canada and Switzerland) tend to have lower overall birth rates and stable populations.
No one is "giving" you anything, they are allowing you to test drive it, that is all. So, for the car analogy, you go to the Ford dealership to test drive a car. After the first mile, it won't go over 30. After 3 miles, it won't go over 20. After 5 miles, it will only idle, forcing you to pull over.
And Silly Car Analogy of the Year goes to....
One alternative, the time-limited trial, lets you drive with full features until the drop-dead date -- at which point the engine stops, the steering locks, the doors latch, the radio goes out, and you're riding a dead lump of steel down the highway at full speed. A red light on the dash comes on, informing you that you should contact the Ford dealership immediately if you want to continue your driving experience.
Another alternative, the feature-limited (or sample-level) trial, lets you test drive the vehicle for as long as you want, as long as you never go more than a hundred yards from the dealership and don't exceed 10 miles per hour. If you try to go beyond the 100-yard barrier, the car automatically turns around, and the in-dash display plays a Ford advertisement.
It turns out that when you express any free trial as a car analogy, it always sounds stupid and annoying.
They can just learn the MS stuff and then go out and support users, instead of spending all their time in training, or learning how to diagnose weird interactions between different browsers and configurations.
For reference, New York City consumes approximately 5 million cubic meters (that's 5 million tons) of water per day.
If we started to use water at that rate right now, we'd exhaust the Moon's supply by sometime this summer.
That said, I would expect Moon dwellers to be more conscious of their water use, and to recycle their wastewater to a much greater extent. The population of the Moon also won't approach that of NYC any time soon.
On the other hand, it's probably not a good idea to assume that we will recover water from the Moon's surface with 100% efficiency. As well, very few New Yorkers are likely to use their tap water as a source of (for example) rocket fuel.
It seems crazy to me to embed a particular Gamma value into an image....In fact it seems so crazy I must be missing something. Am I?
The article actually touches on this point. The sensitivity of the human eye isn't linear. If you use a linear scale to store luminosity information for an image, you waste a lot of bit depth at high luminosities - the eye has difficulty distinguishing between very bright and very bright plus a little tiny bit. On the other hand, the eye is very good at telling the difference between very dark and black. You need a lot of finely-graduated steps at low luminosity or else your shadows get jaggy.
If you uniformly (linearly) space out luminosities on an 8-bit (256-shade) scale, you store a lot of uninteresting information at the high end, and lose out on visible detail at the low end. A scale with gamma of 2.2 (typical these days) fits a full twenty-eight grey values between 0 and 1 on our hypothetical linear scale. To maintain that kind of luminosity resolution (down where it matters), you'd have to store an extra five bits on your linear scale. An extra sixty percent costs.
Before we get too much further into hyperventilating about Berkeley's hypocrisy, perhaps it would be wise to actually read the RFP, neh? The City of Berkeley doesn't bar all contractors who do work that involves any nuclear technology, and they're not being hypocritical about taking dirty, nuclear-powered electricity. The restriction they impose is on contractors who do work to design, build, and construct nuclear weapons.
The RFP also demands that contractors pay all of their employees a decent living minimum wage ($12.20 with medical benefits, or $14.23 without), and that domestic parters of workers receive the same benefits as are available to workers' spouses. There's even a provision that paper reports to the city be printed double-sided on recycled paper.
The people of Berkeley are holding companies to higher ethical standards by the only means that are effective -- cash and contracts.
Ironically they're most likely going to waste more paper and "destroy" the environment by denying obvious progress.
Page 21 of the RFP: "D. Recycled Paper. All reports to the City shall be on recycled paper that contains at least 50% recycled product.... Written reports or studies shall be printed on both sides of the page..."
That's my point, really. Test in situations where a failure has less severe consequences and you can troubleshoot smaller pieces first. Do the full-on Wednesday-morning test after you can pass the other tests.
While it's important to be able to recover from a power failure, it's also important that designing and testing your redundant power solution doesn't do more damage to the business than not testing.
Not if you have adequate fire protection and it's not an area subject to earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods.
And there is never any construction which might sever a fiber.
And there are never any vehicles carrying hazardous materials in the neighborhood.
And there aren't any natural gas lines within a few hundred yards of your facility.
And there's no chance a deranged wingnut will get out his sniper rifle and shut down the area.
And the sewer line never clogs and backs up.
Past a certain point, hardening a single site against all possible disasters, inconveniences, flukes, and freak occurrences (those you can think of and those your imagination didn't come up with) gets more costly than some backup servers across town. Sure, it comes down to what your budget and your level of risk aversion will tolerate, but pretending you can make a single site truly five-nines available is a fantasy that will bite you on the ass eventually.
The best way to test your power backup system is to throw the main switch and see what fails.
I'd say that's the most rigorous, realistic way to test, but I'm not sure that it's the best way to test.
So, you pulled the main breaker and took out all of the production servers because there was a problem with your UPS configuration software? Oops. Why didn't you try it on one server today, then one rack tomorrow, and then pull the plug on the whole system after close on business on Friday?
Pulling the Big Red Switch is one good way to test, but it's not the only way, and it almost certainly shouldn't be first thing that you try.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty well. The Patriot carries a 200 lb (90 kg) warhead, which is easily enough to kill a soft target like an unarmored shipping container.
Plus, a container travelling at 25 knots (by ship) or less than a 100 mph (road or rail) is a very easy target to intercept.
Why, I'm surprised you'd even have to ask that sort of question.
That depends. If you're older than the Senator, then he probably has a similar history: "Well, Senator, if you want to know why I was called p00nhunter then you should probably ask yo' mamma."
If you're younger than the Senatory in question, you can play to his ignorance: "Well, Senator Stevens, they're small, scaly creatures which inhabit the darkest and dampest tubes of the Internet. Few fourteen-year-olds had the boldness to probe the depths in search of the wily p00n; I think I was precocious."
Your criticism would be entirely apt if the article's complaint (and my subsequent comment) had anything to do with speech recognition or silly 3D rendering.
I was using ICQ back in 1998, and it had the option of displaying each chat character as it was typed. It meant you could express more complex thoughts, without requiring the other person to sit and wait patiently for you to develop a whole paragraph. It let the other guy step in and say 'I see where you're going, but let me stop you there...'. It opened up opportunities for dramatic timing and deliberate use of backspacing for comedic effect. It was more 'live' than a one-line-at-a-time chat modality, despite its warts. While this style of online chat may not be particularly popular today, it was (and still is) readily available.
In real-life telephone conversations, you don't get to review each sentence before it goes out over the wire; if you choose the wrong word you just have to live with it.
To the other point, I just have to say -- what? People can perform tasks flawlessly in movies? It turns out that unless required for dramatic effect (as a somewhat-lazy shorthand to convey nervousness or poorly-concealed deception), characters always speak in clear, perfect setences and never use the word "um". Their shoelaces are always tied, their hair is always perfect, and they never miss the bus unless their character is required to be unlucky or miserable. People in movies seldom need to visit the washroom, and then only to have private conversations -- never to defecate, except as a route to teen-movie fart jokes.
Movies are a projection of reality, not an exact duplicate. People tend to do non-visually-arresting and plot-irrelevant things faster or behind the scenes. Watching someone make typos for two hours isn't my idea of a good time.
Now, whether or not you truncate the decimal or round it, I'm not sure. In this case it doesn't matter though, it comes to 137 either way.
Nope, it doesn't. The correct answer is 138 votes to pass. As you noted, 206 times 2/3 is 137 plus one third. 137 votes is less than two thirds of 206; it therefore doesn't pass either.
(If the supermajority calculation is confusing, consider a conceptually-easier simple majority (1/2) case. In the hypothetical case of 101 voters, a pass is 51 votes - being the first integer greater than 50.5 - not 50.)
Why is this hard?
I'm not sure why you figure the threshold for 'worthwhile' is 1 year to recover initial capital
Why do you believe I make that assumption? I was simply offering order-of-magnitude estimates for each of the values; as they're in the same ballpark, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the payback period might be acceptable.
It's all about cost: how much does the device cost, and how much maintenance it requires, this translates into a cost per Kwh, which tells us if it is a good idea; but I guess it'll probably be more expensive than wind power.
Well, the article claims 2 kW output. Let's figure cows are walking 16 hours per day (two shifts); that's 32 kWh per day (most optimistic assumption). If it's sold back to the grid at ten cents per kWh, we're looking at 3.20 USD per day, or about 1000 USD per year.
Now, those are some optimistic assumptions (about per-day use, and electricity rates) but not totally ridiculous. If you can make a cow treadmill for a thousand bucks (Amazon quotes prices of four hunded to a couple thousand dollars for people treadmills) then you might have something worthwhile there.
That said, I don't know what the maintenance will run you, nor how much it will cost to bring feed to the now non-grazing cattle....
Moreover, both of those reports were live hours before this story got greenlighted for the Slashdot frontpage.
Slashdot: Yesterday's News for Nerds. Stuff that Mattered.
Yeah, but if I were to file a lawsuit every time a minimum-wage slave in a crappy job wasn't as chipper and cheery (or, even worse, showed a hint of a sense of humor) -- particularly if I was going to moan about events that took place over the last six years -- I'd never have time to do anything else with my life.
I'm assuming that the cashier in question is already finished high school, is out of college, and is busy doing something productive with his life. It's a bit late to be giving the old Customer Service 101 lessons now.
But nothing is better than Wonderflonium. (Do not bounce.)
Actually, I can't think of a single seal of approval, or certification, that means anything.
Underwriters Laboratories.
Think about it, who would you rather have, the guy with 10 years Software Engineering experience in the field or the one just fresh out of university with a Maths Doctorate
I know the snap answer my gut wants to give, and I know the answer that the parent is looking for - and those two answers are the same - but something still gives me pause.
It occurs to me that the fellow with the math PhD just spent the last four to seven years of his life learning how to use novel tools to solve difficult problems, and the fact that he managed to write a thesis suggests that he actually did learn a little bit about how to work in a self-directed manner on a long-term project.
It also occurs to me to wonder why the guy with ten years of work experience is willing to work for the same money as the guy who's fresh out of school. Did I write the job description poorly, are someone's expectations poorly calibrated, did a local company go bankrupt, or is the guy with ten years' experience looking at entry-level positions for a less-than-flattering reason?
Realistically, there are some projects that I would want the PhD on, and some for which I would prefer the highly-experienced software engineer.
Gates' actual quote:
“if we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [his initial 2050 global population projection of 9-billion] by perhaps about 10 to 15 percent.”
Sure, I suppose that could mean that he advocates surreptitiously sterilizing Third-World women under the guise of providing health services.
But what it probably means is that he believes societies with better access to health care have a greater fraction of children survive to adulthood and see far, far, far fewer of their women die in childbirth. Access to birth control permits women to space out their children more, with benefits to the health of mother and child. Those societies (like, say, the villianous dystopias of Canada and Switzerland) tend to have lower overall birth rates and stable populations.
No one is "giving" you anything, they are allowing you to test drive it, that is all. So, for the car analogy, you go to the Ford dealership to test drive a car. After the first mile, it won't go over 30. After 3 miles, it won't go over 20. After 5 miles, it will only idle, forcing you to pull over.
And Silly Car Analogy of the Year goes to....
One alternative, the time-limited trial, lets you drive with full features until the drop-dead date -- at which point the engine stops, the steering locks, the doors latch, the radio goes out, and you're riding a dead lump of steel down the highway at full speed. A red light on the dash comes on, informing you that you should contact the Ford dealership immediately if you want to continue your driving experience.
Another alternative, the feature-limited (or sample-level) trial, lets you test drive the vehicle for as long as you want, as long as you never go more than a hundred yards from the dealership and don't exceed 10 miles per hour. If you try to go beyond the 100-yard barrier, the car automatically turns around, and the in-dash display plays a Ford advertisement.
It turns out that when you express any free trial as a car analogy, it always sounds stupid and annoying.
They can just learn the MS stuff and then go out and support users, instead of spending all their time in training, or learning how to diagnose weird interactions between different browsers and configurations.
There, I fixed that for you.
If we started to use water at that rate right now, we'd exhaust the Moon's supply by sometime this summer.
That said, I would expect Moon dwellers to be more conscious of their water use, and to recycle their wastewater to a much greater extent. The population of the Moon also won't approach that of NYC any time soon.
On the other hand, it's probably not a good idea to assume that we will recover water from the Moon's surface with 100% efficiency. As well, very few New Yorkers are likely to use their tap water as a source of (for example) rocket fuel.
It seems crazy to me to embed a particular Gamma value into an image. ...In fact it seems so crazy I must be missing something. Am I?
The article actually touches on this point. The sensitivity of the human eye isn't linear. If you use a linear scale to store luminosity information for an image, you waste a lot of bit depth at high luminosities - the eye has difficulty distinguishing between very bright and very bright plus a little tiny bit. On the other hand, the eye is very good at telling the difference between very dark and black. You need a lot of finely-graduated steps at low luminosity or else your shadows get jaggy.
If you uniformly (linearly) space out luminosities on an 8-bit (256-shade) scale, you store a lot of uninteresting information at the high end, and lose out on visible detail at the low end. A scale with gamma of 2.2 (typical these days) fits a full twenty-eight grey values between 0 and 1 on our hypothetical linear scale. To maintain that kind of luminosity resolution (down where it matters), you'd have to store an extra five bits on your linear scale. An extra sixty percent costs.
Yes, excepting that this issue is talking about the bug in image editors.
Keep reading the article; this problem exists in web browsers as well.
Here's a copy (PDF) of the form in question.
The RFP also demands that contractors pay all of their employees a decent living minimum wage ($12.20 with medical benefits, or $14.23 without), and that domestic parters of workers receive the same benefits as are available to workers' spouses. There's even a provision that paper reports to the city be printed double-sided on recycled paper.
The people of Berkeley are holding companies to higher ethical standards by the only means that are effective -- cash and contracts.
Ironically they're most likely going to waste more paper and "destroy" the environment by denying obvious progress.
Page 21 of the RFP: "D. Recycled Paper. All reports to the City shall be on recycled paper that contains at least 50% recycled product.... Written reports or studies shall be printed on both sides of the page..."
Oh.
What you need is an old fashioned 10Base2 card designed for coax, you need terminators and you need to make sure the cable is of the right impedance.
Well, I don't know if that's what he needs -- 10Base2 isn't any faster than the wireless routers he's using now.
What if the power goes out on Wednesday?
That's my point, really. Test in situations where a failure has less severe consequences and you can troubleshoot smaller pieces first. Do the full-on Wednesday-morning test after you can pass the other tests.
While it's important to be able to recover from a power failure, it's also important that designing and testing your redundant power solution doesn't do more damage to the business than not testing.
Not if you have adequate fire protection and it's not an area subject to earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods.
And there is never any construction which might sever a fiber.
And there are never any vehicles carrying hazardous materials in the neighborhood.
And there aren't any natural gas lines within a few hundred yards of your facility.
And there's no chance a deranged wingnut will get out his sniper rifle and shut down the area.
And the sewer line never clogs and backs up.
Past a certain point, hardening a single site against all possible disasters, inconveniences, flukes, and freak occurrences (those you can think of and those your imagination didn't come up with) gets more costly than some backup servers across town. Sure, it comes down to what your budget and your level of risk aversion will tolerate, but pretending you can make a single site truly five-nines available is a fantasy that will bite you on the ass eventually.
"5 9's" of reliability still leaves 1.14 hours per year of outages.
5 nines - 99.999% - reliability is about 5 minutes of downtime per year, not more than an hour.
The best way to test your power backup system is to throw the main switch and see what fails.
I'd say that's the most rigorous, realistic way to test, but I'm not sure that it's the best way to test.
So, you pulled the main breaker and took out all of the production servers because there was a problem with your UPS configuration software? Oops. Why didn't you try it on one server today, then one rack tomorrow, and then pull the plug on the whole system after close on business on Friday?
Pulling the Big Red Switch is one good way to test, but it's not the only way, and it almost certainly shouldn't be first thing that you try.