On one of my trips to the middle east a few years ago, we had about 5000 soldiers at our location, and about five 56k modems worth of bandwidth to serve them all. Yes, you read that correctly.
On the other hand, one would think that soldiers in a war zone might expect a little bit of hardship--contrary to popular/. belief, one can survive without access to broadband internet. Just what was on kernel.org that was so all-fired important, anyway?
If the troops are using that internet connection to write email and keep in touch with the family back home, that's fine.
56 kbit/s * 5 lines is about 256 kbit/s,
256 kbit/s = 32 kB/s,
call it about 15 pages of text per second,
or about fifty thousand pages of text per hour. To fill that pipe with text, each of those five thousand troops would need to generate more than two hundred pages per day of email.
If you're allowed to send and receive small images, then each soldier's allowance drops off to, say, twenty-five pages of text and 500K of other data per day.
People used to communicate over 300 baud connections, remember?
The owner determined that having a CNE wasn't such a good idea after.
And I sincerely hope that after firing the CNE, the owner also fired your sorry ass.
You were miffed that they hired someone with paper qualifications and no experience, so you decided on your own initiative:
to quietly fix errors made by the new guy, rather than talking to him and helping him gain that vaunted experience you're so proud of,
to not talk to your manager/the owner about the problems the new guy was having/causing,
that the company should suffer several days of server downtime because you didn't like their hiring decision.
Did I miss anything? Incidentally, I note that the other two guys in your IT department couldn't fix the server while you were gone. Maybe management had the right idea, trying to hire someone with qualifications--what if their resident expert was unavailable over a long weekend, eh?
Hypothetical question to hiring managers: would you prefer an employee who makes honest mistakes, or one that will let the network go down for several days out of spite? (The correct answer is c: Go back to the resume pile and find someone else.)
No, you should return it and state that you expect products that you buy from them work for more than 8 hours. Demand a full refund or exchange.
Eh? The product works exactly as described on the package--it was viewable for eight hours after opening--and you bought it from the clearly-labeled 'disposable DVD' section of the store, and paid significantly less than for the conventional DVD...
And you're going to hassle the store for a refund?
I bought milk a while ago. It went sour after the expiry date. Should I demand a refund from the supermarket because their product didn't exceed the specifications on its label?
Give me a break. I agree wholeheartedly that disposable DVDs are a stupid product. I expect that they will probably go away on their own--unlike most Slashdot boycotts, real people in the real world also will hate these things. But demanding a refund because they actually work as advertised is a tad disingenuous.
The funny thing about those books was that our heros were capable of faster than light travel, but they had to do all their interstellar navigation using slide rules!
This seems to be a recurring theme in classic science fiction. In James Blish's Cities in Flight novels, I remember a scene that described in passing the automated deviced that consumed the dishes from table, and recycled all the waste for the next meal.
One of the characters was irked because the table ate his slide rule.
Flying a City at a comfortable multiple of c was accomplished under the control of City Fathers: advanced computers that used...transistors. (Some very old Cities still used tubes.) Germanium was a currency metal, a situation that presumably developed due to the huge volume of the stuff necessary to supply the computing needs of a galaxy....
Still, credit where it is due--Blish wrote an excellent series, and it's still worth a read.
Wearability because as a female, I own at least 3 watches to suit my moods and clothing. With everyone having the same watch, we are one step closer to uniformity. This squelches uniqueness and creativity.
I was always under the impression that women already enjoyed a great deal more latitude than men in choice of clothing in a business environment. I mean, there's only so many variations on "dark suit, shirt, tie" that a guy can work with....
Carry the security watch in your purse and wear whatever fashionable watch you prefer on your wrist.
Or be glad you're not working at McDonald's, where they prescribe every aspect of your attire except for the watch. For that matter, I work in a research environment, and we all wear the same lab coats. Intense magnetic fields preclude the wearing of watches or jewellery. Obviously I suffer terribly, as I have to rely on my personality to establish my individuality....
I was reading a book called "Information and randomness" the other day (highly technical book) and about 50 of the papers in the bibliography are by Chaitin!
It's not surprising that Chaitin was cited so often in the book--he's one of the three co-authors.
Which is not to suggest that I don't think his work is brilliant; it's just that the sampling represented in the references is not entirely unbiased.
... and then smash the squirrel into teeny tiny bits.
I've found that this is extraordinarily difficult to do under normal conditions, and quite messy.
I have found that both problems can be readily solved by freezing the squirrel in liquid nitrogen. (After feeding it the phone bits and before smashing.)
I work for AT&T Wireless as a customer care rep (indirectly, through a contractor)... it doesn't surprise me that we're the #2 most hated cellphone company. I would say that 90% of the calls I get are because somebody...did something really stupid.
Of course, the grandparent post and linked article actually place AT&T in the number three spot.
Why would they be unable to complete a krebs cycle and liberate ATP for energy? Where there are living creatures, there is a source for energy.
Yeah, but if you want to do Krebs cycle, then you have to have ten or so enzymes, and then you have to add the machinery to sythesize enzymes, and then suddenly you're talking about creating little living organisms, not nanomachines. You also need to bathe your organisms in food.
Such a 'green goo' scenario seems quite unlikely, mostly because it hasn't happened yet. Trying to assemble an organism that will outcompete every other living creature in every other biological niche is, I dare say, impossible. ('Impossible' is not a word I use lightly, either.)
Granted, it would be relatively easy to create any number of organisms that could wipe out most or all human life, but that's not the same type of scenario.
Is there any spot on the globe that is devoid of every kind of RF? What keeps this scenario "remotely possible" is that fact.
Except that the amount of RF energy available is too damn tiny. For a nanomachine a hundred meters from a 1 MW (megawatt) television transmitter, the incident RF power will be on the order of 10 watts per square meter. Most places, the incident power will be orders of magnitude less.
On a sunny day in New York or London, the incident visible and IR radiation intensity is on the order of 1000 watts per square meter. Plants in the field are perhaps 1% efficient at converting incoming solar radiation into useful energy. So an RF parasite might--under ideal conditions and in a few lucky locations--have almost as much energy to play with as...dandelions. Sure, they spread readily and grow quickly, but they have yet to take over every square inch of the earth and wipe out civilization.
People want an open public form of communication, but are unwilling to accept email from people they don't want to hear. I think its interesting that people expect others (i.e. government) to go after these individuals in the hopes that it will put an end to all unwanted email (especially when the individuals are in other countries).
People want an open public form of communcation, but are unwilling to accept telephone calls from people that they don't want to hear. I think it's interesting that people expect others (i.e. government) to go after these individuals in the hope that it will put an end to all unwated telephone calls...
Regulating such calls would be untenable. Legislating an end to telemarketing calls entirely--that would be totally unreasonable. Right.
There are also laws regarding junk faxes and restrictions on junk snail mail. Having the government regulate advertising in telecommunications is not exactly a new concept. It it unreasonable that people expect them to step in for email as well?
Am I the only one who sees the irony in an article wondering about on-line peer reviewed papers being feasible being discussed on what is probably the ultimate instance of on-line peer reviewing of publications?
And what do we see on Slashdot?
Highly moderated comments that demonstrate the poster didn't even read the linked Slashdot article.
Highly moderated posts that contain gross factual inaccuracies.
Good ideas poorly presented. Information utterly hamstrung by impenetrably poor grammar or spelling. (Good copy editors are worth their weight in gold.)
Incidentally, the parent post is an example of the first problem--the Nature reports linked aren't about online peer review, they're about open (free as in beer) access to papers peer reviewed in a conventional manner.
Peer review also isn't a straight up moderation process--it involves discussion and debate back and forth between reviewers and the paper authors. Publication is often an iterative process that refines a paper before it sees daylight. Quite frankly, peer review has probably also saved quite a few researchers from inadvertantly embarrassing themselves by putting sloppy science out into the public domain.
Nominate reviewers in the scientific community. Rate articles, and if they get a high enough score they are posted to the main page. The few with the highest scores each month are "Published" in a special monthly addition.
Um...this is how the system works now, except that there isn't usually the middle ground between 'published' and 'not published'. Where 'families' of journals exist (the Nature Publishing Group, for instance) such ranking does happen--your paper might not be good enough to go into Nature, but it might end up in Nature Biotechnology--off the 'main page', as it were, but still posted.
Reviews will be better because 50 eyes are better than 3.
Eek. I'd rather see three people each spend six hours of their time than fifty people contribute ten minutes. I'd rather work with a professional copy editor than scores of Slashdot grammar pedants. I'd rather see an editor with the authority to publish something controversial than hordes of moderators armed with (-1, Flamebait) mods.
Poor papers may get in if they hit a few indifferent reviewers, and good papers may be bounced for similar reasons.
Yeah, this happens. Yeah, this sucks.
If your paper gets bounced, you look at the reviewers' comments--maybe you did miss something, and maybe you do need more data or tighter analysis. If you still think the paper holds together well, send it to another journal. There are more than twenty thousand peer-reviewed journals out there; let someone else have a crack at it. Maybe your result just isn't as earth-shattering as you think, and you should send it to a second- or third-tier journal, rather than to Nature.
Public, web-based, open moderation may not be the way to go for scholarly papers. Properly reviewing a paper takes at the very least several hours, and often involves a bit of back and forth between the reviewer and author. It's not something that can or should be done by someone after a five minute cursory glance through the abstract and conclusions.
As an aside, I've noticed that more and more online journals now have a sidebar linking directly to their most-downloaded papers--a sort of post-review moderation.
10,000 lines... from the perspective of a writer, is about 400 standard manuscript pages, double spaced.
Ten thousand lines...fifty weeks per year, that's two hundred lines per working week...
...forty lines per working day...
...five net lines per hour.
Working full time, Linus could write one line of the kernel every twelve minutes.
If each line is eighty characters, Linus had to be able to type 1.3 words per minute.
If you assume he had to write the whole thing twice, and he was only able to work for six hours a day, and only on weekends...he's still only typing 8.5 words per minute. It's amazing what one can accomplish through slow, steady progress, isn't it?
Expect to see more such moves if the Green Party of Canada comes to power in this month's federal election.
Well, that's an interesting remark on several levels.
Education policy is in the purview of the provinces, not the federal government. It's a right that the provinces have historically jealously guarded; they would probably defy such suggestions from the feds just as a matter of principle.
'If' the Green Party comes to power? Nationally, they have less than 10% support. As the parent notes, they're not coming to power. If a minority government is elected, they might hold some swing votes in a coalition government.
In Ontario, it was a provincial Liberal government that adopted StarOffice. Based on this precedent, it could be argued that one should vote Liberal for more such moves....
Then repeated that phrase several times and then gave a message telling people to click the link below for more Hot Sexy Naked Women which took them to a page that admonished them for looking for such trash.
That was you? You bastard. It's your fault I could never find porn.
Avoid use of the flash. Its a 'brute force' attempt to get good lighting.
Important exception: if you have backlighting or harsh shadows on the subject--sometimes it's a good idea to use flash to fill in and soften.
One of the biggest difficulties associated with challenging lighting situations is that our eyes have a much greater dynamic range than the film (or CCD, in this case.) Something that looks like a hint of shadow to our eyes turns into an ugly slash of darkness when you take a picture.
It all depends on the nature of the change and the purpose of the photos. My grandfather has been an avid photographer for decades, and has been doing digital for a few years now.
He's been very popular among his female friends because he can conceal double chins and smooth out symptoms of age.
When he travels, he doesn't have to climb trees or hang off cliffs to move an ugly poster or telephone wire or the like out of the frame--he can just edit it out. (In my own travelling, I've hopped more than one fence to get something undesirable out of a picture...probably risked my life doing it, too.) He's happier with the pictures, and that's what really counts, right?
If he was selling the pictures to the Times after processing them, then I'd have a problem with it.
...who cares if we don't take "perfect" pictures. We couldnt take perfect pictures with film cameras either - or with VHS or 8mm camcorders, but who cares?
Your friends and family care. You made us look through your photo album, and we had to suffer through scores--nay, hundreds--of badly cropped, underexposed, flash-washed-out, out-of-focus snapshots.
Twenty years from now, you'll be thrilled to have a few good pictures of your kids. You don't have to take perfect pictures, but you just spent a lot of money on a camera--wouldn't you like to get good-quality images?
It doesn't take much effort to check the focus, make sure the horizon is level, check the exposure, and remember to include the top of Aunt Millie's head--but you'd be surprised at how many people fail to think of these things. A little reminder doesn't seem out of place. Photography is a lot like cooking. You can make it as complicated and artistic as you want, but producing acceptable, aesthetically pleasing meals or photos that you needn't be embarrassed to present to company is within reach of anyone.
Instead, I've got an old bedside-table mirror, which I'm going to tape up, leaving only a tiny hole in the middle of it. Since my bedroom is quite long, I'll project an image from the pinhole mirror onto the opposite wall. Hopefully that'll work; I'm about 50% sure that it will. The mirror might not be flat enough, of course, but that's preferable to a CD which only filters visible light.
The mirror should be flat enough. I inadvertently discovered that my watch face was sufficient for at least a half-assed projection of an annular eclipse back in 1994. Using the mirror, you get a flatter surface and--I imagine--a smaller aperture. Happy viewing!
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, one would think that soldiers in a war zone might expect a little bit of hardship--contrary to popular /. belief, one can survive without access to broadband internet. Just what was on kernel.org that was so all-fired important, anyway?
If the troops are using that internet connection to write email and keep in touch with the family back home, that's fine.
56 kbit/s * 5 lines is about 256 kbit/s,
256 kbit/s = 32 kB/s,
call it about 15 pages of text per second,
or about fifty thousand pages of text per hour. To fill that pipe with text, each of those five thousand troops would need to generate more than two hundred pages per day of email.
If you're allowed to send and receive small images, then each soldier's allowance drops off to, say, twenty-five pages of text and 500K of other data per day.
People used to communicate over 300 baud connections, remember?
It kind of disturbs me that I at first read this as having something to do with a weird nickel and phosphorus compound...
And I sincerely hope that after firing the CNE, the owner also fired your sorry ass.
You were miffed that they hired someone with paper qualifications and no experience, so you decided on your own initiative:
to quietly fix errors made by the new guy, rather than talking to him and helping him gain that vaunted experience you're so proud of,
to not talk to your manager/the owner about the problems the new guy was having/causing,
that the company should suffer several days of server downtime because you didn't like their hiring decision.
Did I miss anything? Incidentally, I note that the other two guys in your IT department couldn't fix the server while you were gone. Maybe management had the right idea, trying to hire someone with qualifications--what if their resident expert was unavailable over a long weekend, eh?
Hypothetical question to hiring managers: would you prefer an employee who makes honest mistakes, or one that will let the network go down for several days out of spite? (The correct answer is c: Go back to the resume pile and find someone else.)
Eh? The product works exactly as described on the package--it was viewable for eight hours after opening--and you bought it from the clearly-labeled 'disposable DVD' section of the store, and paid significantly less than for the conventional DVD...
And you're going to hassle the store for a refund?
I bought milk a while ago. It went sour after the expiry date. Should I demand a refund from the supermarket because their product didn't exceed the specifications on its label?
Give me a break. I agree wholeheartedly that disposable DVDs are a stupid product. I expect that they will probably go away on their own--unlike most Slashdot boycotts, real people in the real world also will hate these things. But demanding a refund because they actually work as advertised is a tad disingenuous.
This seems to be a recurring theme in classic science fiction. In James Blish's Cities in Flight novels, I remember a scene that described in passing the automated deviced that consumed the dishes from table, and recycled all the waste for the next meal.
One of the characters was irked because the table ate his slide rule.
Flying a City at a comfortable multiple of c was accomplished under the control of City Fathers: advanced computers that used...transistors. (Some very old Cities still used tubes.) Germanium was a currency metal, a situation that presumably developed due to the huge volume of the stuff necessary to supply the computing needs of a galaxy....
Still, credit where it is due--Blish wrote an excellent series, and it's still worth a read.
And if you keep listening to music that is that loud, believe me--you won't hear that noise floor for very long....
I was always under the impression that women already enjoyed a great deal more latitude than men in choice of clothing in a business environment. I mean, there's only so many variations on "dark suit, shirt, tie" that a guy can work with....
Carry the security watch in your purse and wear whatever fashionable watch you prefer on your wrist.
Or be glad you're not working at McDonald's, where they prescribe every aspect of your attire except for the watch. For that matter, I work in a research environment, and we all wear the same lab coats. Intense magnetic fields preclude the wearing of watches or jewellery. Obviously I suffer terribly, as I have to rely on my personality to establish my individuality....
It's not surprising that Chaitin was cited so often in the book--he's one of the three co-authors.
Which is not to suggest that I don't think his work is brilliant; it's just that the sampling represented in the references is not entirely unbiased.
I've found that this is extraordinarily difficult to do under normal conditions, and quite messy.
I have found that both problems can be readily solved by freezing the squirrel in liquid nitrogen. (After feeding it the phone bits and before smashing.)
Cheers.
Of course, the grandparent post and linked article actually place AT&T in the number three spot.
I think I've found the problem....
Yeah, but if you want to do Krebs cycle, then you have to have ten or so enzymes, and then you have to add the machinery to sythesize enzymes, and then suddenly you're talking about creating little living organisms, not nanomachines. You also need to bathe your organisms in food.
Such a 'green goo' scenario seems quite unlikely, mostly because it hasn't happened yet. Trying to assemble an organism that will outcompete every other living creature in every other biological niche is, I dare say, impossible. ('Impossible' is not a word I use lightly, either.)
Granted, it would be relatively easy to create any number of organisms that could wipe out most or all human life, but that's not the same type of scenario.
Is there any spot on the globe that is devoid of every kind of RF? What keeps this scenario "remotely possible" is that fact.
Except that the amount of RF energy available is too damn tiny. For a nanomachine a hundred meters from a 1 MW (megawatt) television transmitter, the incident RF power will be on the order of 10 watts per square meter. Most places, the incident power will be orders of magnitude less.
On a sunny day in New York or London, the incident visible and IR radiation intensity is on the order of 1000 watts per square meter. Plants in the field are perhaps 1% efficient at converting incoming solar radiation into useful energy. So an RF parasite might--under ideal conditions and in a few lucky locations--have almost as much energy to play with as...dandelions. Sure, they spread readily and grow quickly, but they have yet to take over every square inch of the earth and wipe out civilization.
People want an open public form of communcation, but are unwilling to accept telephone calls from people that they don't want to hear. I think it's interesting that people expect others (i.e. government) to go after these individuals in the hope that it will put an end to all unwated telephone calls...
Regulating such calls would be untenable. Legislating an end to telemarketing calls entirely--that would be totally unreasonable. Right.
There are also laws regarding junk faxes and restrictions on junk snail mail. Having the government regulate advertising in telecommunications is not exactly a new concept. It it unreasonable that people expect them to step in for email as well?
And what do we see on Slashdot?
Highly moderated comments that demonstrate the poster didn't even read the linked Slashdot article.
Highly moderated posts that contain gross factual inaccuracies.
Good ideas poorly presented. Information utterly hamstrung by impenetrably poor grammar or spelling. (Good copy editors are worth their weight in gold.)
Incidentally, the parent post is an example of the first problem--the Nature reports linked aren't about online peer review, they're about open (free as in beer) access to papers peer reviewed in a conventional manner.
Peer review also isn't a straight up moderation process--it involves discussion and debate back and forth between reviewers and the paper authors. Publication is often an iterative process that refines a paper before it sees daylight. Quite frankly, peer review has probably also saved quite a few researchers from inadvertantly embarrassing themselves by putting sloppy science out into the public domain.
Um...this is how the system works now, except that there isn't usually the middle ground between 'published' and 'not published'. Where 'families' of journals exist (the Nature Publishing Group, for instance) such ranking does happen--your paper might not be good enough to go into Nature, but it might end up in Nature Biotechnology--off the 'main page', as it were, but still posted.
Reviews will be better because 50 eyes are better than 3.
Eek. I'd rather see three people each spend six hours of their time than fifty people contribute ten minutes. I'd rather work with a professional copy editor than scores of Slashdot grammar pedants. I'd rather see an editor with the authority to publish something controversial than hordes of moderators armed with (-1, Flamebait) mods.
Yeah, this happens. Yeah, this sucks.
If your paper gets bounced, you look at the reviewers' comments--maybe you did miss something, and maybe you do need more data or tighter analysis. If you still think the paper holds together well, send it to another journal. There are more than twenty thousand peer-reviewed journals out there; let someone else have a crack at it. Maybe your result just isn't as earth-shattering as you think, and you should send it to a second- or third-tier journal, rather than to Nature.
Public, web-based, open moderation may not be the way to go for scholarly papers. Properly reviewing a paper takes at the very least several hours, and often involves a bit of back and forth between the reviewer and author. It's not something that can or should be done by someone after a five minute cursory glance through the abstract and conclusions.
As an aside, I've noticed that more and more online journals now have a sidebar linking directly to their most-downloaded papers--a sort of post-review moderation.
The most secure deletion technique I'm familiar with involves all the usual steps of overwriting the drive several times...
Ten thousand lines...fifty weeks per year, that's two hundred lines per working week...
Working full time, Linus could write one line of the kernel every twelve minutes.
If each line is eighty characters, Linus had to be able to type 1.3 words per minute.
If you assume he had to write the whole thing twice, and he was only able to work for six hours a day, and only on weekends...he's still only typing 8.5 words per minute. It's amazing what one can accomplish through slow, steady progress, isn't it?
Aerogel pics (including the crayon image).
More aerogel pics.
Cheers.
2600? That's nothing.
I can turn mine up to eleven.
Well, that's an interesting remark on several levels.
Education policy is in the purview of the provinces, not the federal government. It's a right that the provinces have historically jealously guarded; they would probably defy such suggestions from the feds just as a matter of principle.
'If' the Green Party comes to power? Nationally, they have less than 10% support. As the parent notes, they're not coming to power. If a minority government is elected, they might hold some swing votes in a coalition government.
In Ontario, it was a provincial Liberal government that adopted StarOffice. Based on this precedent, it could be argued that one should vote Liberal for more such moves....
That was you? You bastard. It's your fault I could never find porn.
Important exception: if you have backlighting or harsh shadows on the subject--sometimes it's a good idea to use flash to fill in and soften.
One of the biggest difficulties associated with challenging lighting situations is that our eyes have a much greater dynamic range than the film (or CCD, in this case.) Something that looks like a hint of shadow to our eyes turns into an ugly slash of darkness when you take a picture.
He's been very popular among his female friends because he can conceal double chins and smooth out symptoms of age.
When he travels, he doesn't have to climb trees or hang off cliffs to move an ugly poster or telephone wire or the like out of the frame--he can just edit it out. (In my own travelling, I've hopped more than one fence to get something undesirable out of a picture...probably risked my life doing it, too.) He's happier with the pictures, and that's what really counts, right?
If he was selling the pictures to the Times after processing them, then I'd have a problem with it.
Your friends and family care. You made us look through your photo album, and we had to suffer through scores--nay, hundreds--of badly cropped, underexposed, flash-washed-out, out-of-focus snapshots.
Twenty years from now, you'll be thrilled to have a few good pictures of your kids. You don't have to take perfect pictures, but you just spent a lot of money on a camera--wouldn't you like to get good-quality images?
It doesn't take much effort to check the focus, make sure the horizon is level, check the exposure, and remember to include the top of Aunt Millie's head--but you'd be surprised at how many people fail to think of these things. A little reminder doesn't seem out of place. Photography is a lot like cooking. You can make it as complicated and artistic as you want, but producing acceptable, aesthetically pleasing meals or photos that you needn't be embarrassed to present to company is within reach of anyone.
The mirror should be flat enough. I inadvertently discovered that my watch face was sufficient for at least a half-assed projection of an annular eclipse back in 1994. Using the mirror, you get a flatter surface and--I imagine--a smaller aperture. Happy viewing!