The advantage is that the atmosphere can only hold a limited amount. When there's too much of it, it precipitates out of the atmosphere (unlike CO2).
And that precipitate is known as "cloud", which is one of the most efficient reflectors of solar energy on the planet.
Figuring out whether the net effect would cause an increase global warming or lead to a big chill is about like stepping into the middle of the debate about the safety of hydric acid (aka hydrogen monoxide).
All talk about crackpots and kooks, etc. makes me wonder don't the scientist ever want to relax a little and just play around with numbers and alterantive theories just for fun?
Reading about Microsoft's "concern" about open formats not providing adequate support for legacy documents in old formats has me chuckling.
I started using StarOffice years ago, and started recommending it to others, solely because it was the only effective way to move MS Office documents between versions of MS Office.
Of course I'm strange-- I've stayed with MS Office 97 all these years for reasons that Microsoft apparently consider to be stupid:
Anything I produce with it is readable with any other version of MS Office in common use. This cannot be said about later versions of MS Office.
I'm used to the interface and have had years of consistently high productivity with it, with none of the periods of lost productivity that are associated with changing software.
I've found that when I can't do something easily in MS Office 97, there is something wrong in my approach-- usually I'm getting more byzantine in my attempted solution than the problem calls for.
MS Office 97 has migrated very well from WinNT to Win98 to WinME and the WinXP Pro that I'm currently using. From what I've seen of other's experience, the same hasn't been true for later versions of MS Office.
I do like the interface on OpenOffice v2.0 (I've started using the beta, which seems to be at least as stable as the MS Office 97 workhorse). I think it is about time I upgraded to it.
RTFM-- this isn't about free beer, it is about free speech. And doing what is needed to protect free speech of future citizens.
About 25 years ago branches of many governments adopted policies for using only acid free paper on official publications. The intent was to assure that citizens of the future would have useable archives when they needed to research old history. These policies were adopted quietly because the advantages were self-evident.
Massachusetts is now extending that basic concept to assure that electronic archives will be useable 50 years or more into the future, long after today's Microsoft's proprietary formats have no more relevance than 6502 Assembly code.
This is about "free as in speech"-- assuring that state generated documents will be readable by any citizen no matter what operating system or software they are running.
It wasn't the "Boston Beer Bash" you know...
I think we can expect that for the next three years the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (it isn't a State) will have increased overhead costs due to conversion and training. I doubt that any competent audit will ever be able to show that the change to Open Office decreased expenses.
[whatever] needs a grammar checker that actually works.
Bah. This kind of statement, when written in english, shows a an amazing disregard for the principle of putting first things first.
English needs a working grammar.
Not the hodge-podge of inconsistent rules half of which were stolen from latin and half from old german, and the third half of archaic Frank, Saxon, and Gaelic ancestry. Once geeks put together a decent self-consistent and rational open source grammar for english, then we can talk about implementing english grammar checkers.
While we are waiting for that, I suggest that the OOo move forward on implementing a spanish grammar checker for that localization, and investigate whether there are any other natural languages with rational grammars that could be modelled in a reasonable way by software.
It all depends. If someone knows windows, has used windows for a long time, then windows might be cheaper. The person pays the hundred bucks or so for the OS and they are done.
Agreed, it all depends on how you want to spin the baseline assumptions before you start measuring. Naturally if you are going to exclude the biggest of the one-time costs for one OS (mastering the learning curve) but include it for the other, then you've introduced a serious bias. In the situation you describe, you aren't measuring the costs of the systems, you are estimating projected costs after adjustment for costs that have already been paid and shouldn't have to be paid again. That isn't a good basis for strategizing; that is something you do after you've decided your strategy and need to decide on the tactical details involved in implementing your decision.
As has been said before, this whole "total cost of ownership" concept is so dependent on the underlying definitions that it can be skewed any which way you want.
A section for 'retired architecture' probably belongs more to a museum than a library. I don't think librarians' skill sets extend to the kind of mickeymouse procedures needed to keep an Apple ][ single-sided single density floppy drive working, or the periodic cleaning a Trash-Eighty keyboard requires.
OTOH, a library could develop and maintain a database of hobbyists and businesses who are willing to recover data stored in obsolete formats.
Is there really a need for a 1960's book on Fortran?
Since differential equation solvers from that era, written in Fortran, are still in use, yeah, I think it would be great if I could use the interlibrary loan to borrow a Fortran text if I ever have to understand the guts of those routines. So I hope some library somewhere is preserving these.
Besides, where but in Fortran can one experience working with trinary logic conditionals? I still remember those three-tailed decision diamonds.
I've been hitting the "reload" button every half minute or so on these comments for a looonng time (in slashdot years) and I haven't seen any comments posted as yet? WTF??
Putting aside the arguments over "natural selection", it remains in the gene pool because it works.
Actually, it can remain in the gene pool so long as it doesn't manifest any negative consequences before the psychopath has started to breed. What happens to him or her after the children are born won't have any effect on the gene pool.
There are a number of nasty genetic diseases like Huntington's chorea that hang on because symptoms don't manifest until after the person with the disease has had children.
The nature of the sociopath or psychopath is such that he is favored to be an early winner in any competitive situation since he is unencumbered by the moral and ethical constraints that shackle the rest of us.
That being the case, the sociopath is likely to breed earlier and with a larger number of partners than the norm. So any genetic contribution to sociopathy is likely to spread widely through a population (since societies tend not to kill off their young until they've done something really, really, bad and sociopaths are not likely to do that until after they have reached breeding age).
I think sociopathy is probably more a product of environment than of genetics.
Two well-worn ways of doing this are: storing user state in a server-side session that expires after 30 minutes or so and persisting data to a data store.
Without the use of a cookie to store the session ID number, how does the server tie the visitor's next request to his state data? Aside from using a small cookie containing that session ID number, the only way I know of doing this is to be always passing the ID number back and forth in the request/response headers like a hot potato-- which I understand makes the session vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Is there something you know that I don't know? Is there perhaps a meta-intranet that allows the browser and server to pass the session ID around by silicon-enabled telepathy??
Using Firefox, I just deleted all cookies, turned on the cookie tracker, and came back to Slashdot.
Slashdot has set a total of 10 cookies: 8 as it was loading and 2 more when I logged in. The breakdown by length of life is interesting:
31 days: 3 cookies expire in 31 days
30 days: 1
1 day: 2
midnight today: 1
end of session: 3
2 of these have no significant content and seem to be used just to determine whether I am allowing cookies in this session; 1 is my log-in ID for the session and another is a repeat of this (maybe there are 9 cookies and this one is being listed twice?). The other 6 appear to be related to advertising.
It is certainly possible that some of these are providing advertisers with demographic data (my ISP is listed in the body of one cookie-- why else would that be there?). But I guess I need to trust that Slashdot and its advertisers will do nothing malicious with this info. Sort of the same way that I trust my hardware store won't sell me substandard counterfeit bolts.
This argument falls flat pretty quick. You don't need to abandon everything else you've learned to learn a new language.
I've got no argument about that. However the time you spend learning a new language I will spend in learning better approaches to the problems that I'm addressing with one language. That is, given a choice between spending half a day learning Ruby's syntax, and putting that time into tweaking a Perl object that models conversions between HTML and XML, I think I'm more productive by any measure continuing my work in Perl.
Not to mention that when I move between Perl, Javascript, and PHP I'm always losing some efficiency in stupid syntax errors, etc, as habits from the wrong language trip me up. These three languages are necessary and sufficient for me to do what I want (RWA stuff), so I can't escape some of these irksome problems. But I certainly don't need to compound them by learning Python.
Every language has advantages & disadvantages.
And every language has the means for working around its disadvantages as well as the capability of elegant expressions. (With the possible exceptions of Cobol and Mumps). There is something to be said for getting really good with a small assortment of tools as opposed to throwing every neat gadget you come across into your toolbox (and then having to spend the time maintaining your skills with all of them gadgets).
Remember, all four of these languages have the same underlying inspirations, so once you know one, it's much easier to learn another.
I know that every significant post-Perl language has drawn heavily on Perl. Perl itself is a distillation of many of the best language ideas that preceded it.
If you're a good PHP or Perl programmer, you can be a competent Ruby programmer in a week with some effort. Do you truly believe that your career & programming ability will be better served by NOT making that effort? If so, that's fine, that just leaves more jobs for the rest of us.
"Dear IT Manager:
I have been working on the kinds of problems that are central to your project for more than five years, coding predominantly in Perl. I understand the issues and concerns that you face. I recognize that you are a Ruby shop. I will be competent in Ruby by the time your HR department has completed my background and reference checks and we enter into the second round of interviews. Since a great deal of my skills in Perl will transfer to Ruby very easily, I will be one of your most experienced Ruby programmers before my three month probationary period is over.
I am very interested in the work that you are doing. Please schedule me for an initial interview as soon as possible. Thank you.
Sincerely,
mg
I think you'd better count on me and a bunch of guys like me as contenders for any job you are interested in.
disenfranchises constituents who use Linux, BSD or Unix operating systems (since there is no MSIE available for them)
shows a reckless disregard for the security issues surrounding MSIE
suggests fiscal irresponsibility and limited expertise in the USCO IT department for them to have come up with this harebrained proposal
Yeah, I know that USCO is saying that they will eventually support other OS, yaddayadda. But there is no need to mention that in a message to your congresscritters-- they can get those details direct from the USCO when their office requests more info.
If a senator's office or a couple of representatives request more info from the USCO because they are hearing complaints from constituents, then whoever is running this project is going to get told by his boss that this approach has become a big problem on the congressional radar screen and they need to get that fixed right away.
I also go along with the sentiment (of sometimes wanting to avoid learning yet another language).
This can be summed up with the question: "Is this guy a programmer with ten years' experience, or a programmer who has repeated one year of experience ten times over?"
As Grasshopper plans his career it can be good if he asks himself how others will see him in a few years.
Why didn't President Carter like the fast breeder reactors?
You'd have to ask him. Keep in mind that before he was President Carter, he was Lieutenant Carter in the US Navy, Naval Reactors Branch, where he developed procedures and training manuals to be used on nuclear submarines.
I suspect that at least part of his opposition to fast breeders had to do with what he knew about the incident at the Fermi 1 fast breeder reactor in 1966, and its eventual shutdown for safety concerns in 1972. These puppies operate well outside the envelope of everyday engineering concerns (pumping molten sodium as a coolant, etc), and Carter would have been keenly aware of the difficulties of developing safe procedures (that had enough latitude to protect against human foibles and downright stupidity).
Stupid sodium, to be so highly reactive chemically. Stupid titanium plating, to be so brittle that it could flake off and float in the sodium to a Bad Place...
I just wish public opinion would change faster so we can get some more nuclear plants as well.
I like the idea of nuclear power and contemporary designs for the power plants look pretty good. But I'm glad that public opinion is keeping their development in check for a while longer.
There are two problems with nuclear power that need to be addressed:
The engineering of waste disposal systems is in its infancy. We need to have something ready to handle the waste as it is produced and nothing we've got at present has more solidity than "artists' concepts". We are more than a decade away from having any commercially viable recycling / disposal process, even if the US Government mounted an Apollo Project to develop such a thing.
There needs to be a revision of business accounting systems so that an industry whose greatest cost of production occurs post-production can be reliably modelled. Our current accounting system hasn't seen any fundamental improvements in cost accounting in the last 75 years or so. The only way it can handle the appropriate assignment of a future cost to the period of production is through explanatory footnotes in the P&L statement-- which means these aren't modelled at all. When it comes to nuclear power and the cost of recycling and waste management, that's bogus. There is currently no way of saying what the total cost per kwh for any existing nuclear plant is, nor any way of estimating what that cost might be for a new plant.
They should instead be trying to build a shuttle that won't rattle apart on takeoff.
Going back to capsule technology means going back to monolithic heat shields and sidesteps the vibration problems. There is nothing on an Apollo-like capsule that could rattle off.
Listen to Python or Ruby folks talk about how much more productive they are in those languages versus Java or C++. There is a reason for that. It's because those languages are more like Lisp.
Well, yes, that's sort of true in a roundabout way. Since Perl borrowed a number of things from Lisp. And junior programmers are more productive in Python and Ruby (than Java or C++) because those languages are like Perl with training wheels.
Lynn exposed a serious security flaw that could have been used to compromise networks throughout the nation.
Your use of the past conditional tense seems presumptious. We do not know whether anyone or any agency has been exploiting this flaw. All we know is that there have not yet been any public failures in attempting to exploit this flaw.
Slashdot Mirror
The advantage is that the atmosphere can only hold a limited amount. When there's too much of it, it precipitates out of the atmosphere (unlike CO2).
And that precipitate is known as "cloud", which is one of the most efficient reflectors of solar energy on the planet.
Figuring out whether the net effect would cause an increase global warming or lead to a big chill is about like stepping into the middle of the debate about the safety of hydric acid (aka hydrogen monoxide).
All talk about crackpots and kooks, etc. makes me wonder don't the scientist ever want to relax a little and just play around with numbers and alterantive theories just for fun?
Nice troll. I almost took the bait.
Reading about Microsoft's "concern" about open formats not providing adequate support for legacy documents in old formats has me chuckling.
I started using StarOffice years ago, and started recommending it to others, solely because it was the only effective way to move MS Office documents between versions of MS Office.
Of course I'm strange-- I've stayed with MS Office 97 all these years for reasons that Microsoft apparently consider to be stupid:
I do like the interface on OpenOffice v2.0 (I've started using the beta, which seems to be at least as stable as the MS Office 97 workhorse). I think it is about time I upgraded to it.
RTFM-- this isn't about free beer, it is about free speech. And doing what is needed to protect free speech of future citizens.
About 25 years ago branches of many governments adopted policies for using only acid free paper on official publications. The intent was to assure that citizens of the future would have useable archives when they needed to research old history. These policies were adopted quietly because the advantages were self-evident.
Massachusetts is now extending that basic concept to assure that electronic archives will be useable 50 years or more into the future, long after today's Microsoft's proprietary formats have no more relevance than 6502 Assembly code.
This isn't about reducing taxes.
This is about "free as in speech"-- assuring that state generated documents will be readable by any citizen no matter what operating system or software they are running.
It wasn't the "Boston Beer Bash" you know...
I think we can expect that for the next three years the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (it isn't a State) will have increased overhead costs due to conversion and training. I doubt that any competent audit will ever be able to show that the change to Open Office decreased expenses.
[whatever] needs a grammar checker that actually works. Bah. This kind of statement, when written in english, shows a an amazing disregard for the principle of putting first things first.
English needs a working grammar.
Not the hodge-podge of inconsistent rules half of which were stolen from latin and half from old german, and the third half of archaic Frank, Saxon, and Gaelic ancestry. Once geeks put together a decent self-consistent and rational open source grammar for english, then we can talk about implementing english grammar checkers.
While we are waiting for that, I suggest that the OOo move forward on implementing a spanish grammar checker for that localization, and investigate whether there are any other natural languages with rational grammars that could be modelled in a reasonable way by software.
It all depends. If someone knows windows, has used windows for a long time, then windows might be cheaper. The person pays the hundred bucks or so for the OS and they are done.
Agreed, it all depends on how you want to spin the baseline assumptions before you start measuring. Naturally if you are going to exclude the biggest of the one-time costs for one OS (mastering the learning curve) but include it for the other, then you've introduced a serious bias. In the situation you describe, you aren't measuring the costs of the systems, you are estimating projected costs after adjustment for costs that have already been paid and shouldn't have to be paid again. That isn't a good basis for strategizing; that is something you do after you've decided your strategy and need to decide on the tactical details involved in implementing your decision.
As has been said before, this whole "total cost of ownership" concept is so dependent on the underlying definitions that it can be skewed any which way you want.
Bah.
A section for 'retired architecture' probably belongs more to a museum than a library. I don't think librarians' skill sets extend to the kind of mickeymouse procedures needed to keep an Apple ][ single-sided single density floppy drive working, or the periodic cleaning a Trash-Eighty keyboard requires.
OTOH, a library could develop and maintain a database of hobbyists and businesses who are willing to recover data stored in obsolete formats.
Is there really a need for a 1960's book on Fortran?
Since differential equation solvers from that era, written in Fortran, are still in use, yeah, I think it would be great if I could use the interlibrary loan to borrow a Fortran text if I ever have to understand the guts of those routines. So I hope some library somewhere is preserving these.
Besides, where but in Fortran can one experience working with trinary logic conditionals? I still remember those three-tailed decision diamonds.
I've been hitting the "reload" button every half minute or so on these comments for a looonng time (in slashdot years) and I haven't seen any comments posted as yet? WTF??
Putting aside the arguments over "natural selection", it remains in the gene pool because it works.
Actually, it can remain in the gene pool so long as it doesn't manifest any negative consequences before the psychopath has started to breed. What happens to him or her after the children are born won't have any effect on the gene pool.
There are a number of nasty genetic diseases like Huntington's chorea that hang on because symptoms don't manifest until after the person with the disease has had children.
The nature of the sociopath or psychopath is such that he is favored to be an early winner in any competitive situation since he is unencumbered by the moral and ethical constraints that shackle the rest of us.
That being the case, the sociopath is likely to breed earlier and with a larger number of partners than the norm. So any genetic contribution to sociopathy is likely to spread widely through a population (since societies tend not to kill off their young until they've done something really, really, bad and sociopaths are not likely to do that until after they have reached breeding age).
I think sociopathy is probably more a product of environment than of genetics.
Two well-worn ways of doing this are: storing user state in a server-side session that expires after 30 minutes or so and persisting data to a data store.
Without the use of a cookie to store the session ID number, how does the server tie the visitor's next request to his state data? Aside from using a small cookie containing that session ID number, the only way I know of doing this is to be always passing the ID number back and forth in the request/response headers like a hot potato-- which I understand makes the session vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Is there something you know that I don't know? Is there perhaps a meta-intranet that allows the browser and server to pass the session ID around by silicon-enabled telepathy??
Using Firefox, I just deleted all cookies, turned on the cookie tracker, and came back to Slashdot.
Slashdot has set a total of 10 cookies: 8 as it was loading and 2 more when I logged in. The breakdown by length of life is interesting:
2 of these have no significant content and seem to be used just to determine whether I am allowing cookies in this session; 1 is my log-in ID for the session and another is a repeat of this (maybe there are 9 cookies and this one is being listed twice?). The other 6 appear to be related to advertising.
It is certainly possible that some of these are providing advertisers with demographic data (my ISP is listed in the body of one cookie-- why else would that be there?). But I guess I need to trust that Slashdot and its advertisers will do nothing malicious with this info. Sort of the same way that I trust my hardware store won't sell me substandard counterfeit bolts.
This argument falls flat pretty quick. You don't need to abandon everything else you've learned to learn a new language.
I've got no argument about that. However the time you spend learning a new language I will spend in learning better approaches to the problems that I'm addressing with one language. That is, given a choice between spending half a day learning Ruby's syntax, and putting that time into tweaking a Perl object that models conversions between HTML and XML, I think I'm more productive by any measure continuing my work in Perl.
Not to mention that when I move between Perl, Javascript, and PHP I'm always losing some efficiency in stupid syntax errors, etc, as habits from the wrong language trip me up. These three languages are necessary and sufficient for me to do what I want (RWA stuff), so I can't escape some of these irksome problems. But I certainly don't need to compound them by learning Python.
Every language has advantages & disadvantages.
And every language has the means for working around its disadvantages as well as the capability of elegant expressions. (With the possible exceptions of Cobol and Mumps). There is something to be said for getting really good with a small assortment of tools as opposed to throwing every neat gadget you come across into your toolbox (and then having to spend the time maintaining your skills with all of them gadgets).
Remember, all four of these languages have the same underlying inspirations, so once you know one, it's much easier to learn another.
I know that every significant post-Perl language has drawn heavily on Perl. Perl itself is a distillation of many of the best language ideas that preceded it.
If you're a good PHP or Perl programmer, you can be a competent Ruby programmer in a week with some effort. Do you truly believe that your career & programming ability will be better served by NOT making that effort? If so, that's fine, that just leaves more jobs for the rest of us.
"Dear IT Manager:
I have been working on the kinds of problems that are central to your project for more than five years, coding predominantly in Perl. I understand the issues and concerns that you face. I recognize that you are a Ruby shop. I will be competent in Ruby by the time your HR department has completed my background and reference checks and we enter into the second round of interviews. Since a great deal of my skills in Perl will transfer to Ruby very easily, I will be one of your most experienced Ruby programmers before my three month probationary period is over.
I am very interested in the work that you are doing. Please schedule me for an initial interview as soon as possible. Thank you.
Sincerely,
mg
I think you'd better count on me and a bunch of guys like me as contenders for any job you are interested in.
From the slashdot-is-moving-to-css-in-just-a-few-weeks dept.
oh I do hope commander taco isn't just putting me on...
Why go to all the hassle of snail-mail to the USCO when you can easily express your concern to your congresscritters online?
Use http://www.webslingerz.com/jhoffman/congress-email .html to get the addresses to your two senators and one congressman. Or google on "[your state] congressmen addresses".
Key phrases that could be useful:
Yeah, I know that USCO is saying that they will eventually support other OS, yaddayadda. But there is no need to mention that in a message to your congresscritters-- they can get those details direct from the USCO when their office requests more info.
If a senator's office or a couple of representatives request more info from the USCO because they are hearing complaints from constituents, then whoever is running this project is going to get told by his boss that this approach has become a big problem on the congressional radar screen and they need to get that fixed right away.
I also go along with the sentiment (of sometimes wanting to avoid learning yet another language).
This can be summed up with the question: "Is this guy a programmer with ten years' experience, or a programmer who has repeated one year of experience ten times over?"
As Grasshopper plans his career it can be good if he asks himself how others will see him in a few years.
Why didn't President Carter like the fast breeder reactors?
You'd have to ask him. Keep in mind that before he was President Carter, he was Lieutenant Carter in the US Navy, Naval Reactors Branch, where he developed procedures and training manuals to be used on nuclear submarines.
I suspect that at least part of his opposition to fast breeders had to do with what he knew about the incident at the Fermi 1 fast breeder reactor in 1966, and its eventual shutdown for safety concerns in 1972. These puppies operate well outside the envelope of everyday engineering concerns (pumping molten sodium as a coolant, etc), and Carter would have been keenly aware of the difficulties of developing safe procedures (that had enough latitude to protect against human foibles and downright stupidity).
Stupid sodium, to be so highly reactive chemically. Stupid titanium plating, to be so brittle that it could flake off and float in the sodium to a Bad Place...
AFAIK, Chernobyl was purely human error.
Well, several purely human errors. Beginning with the use of graphite as the moderator in a high temperature, 21% oxygen environment.
Stupid graphite, to start burning just because things got a little warmer than nominal operations called for...
I just wish public opinion would change faster so we can get some more nuclear plants as well.
I like the idea of nuclear power and contemporary designs for the power plants look pretty good. But I'm glad that public opinion is keeping their development in check for a while longer.
There are two problems with nuclear power that need to be addressed:
They should instead be trying to build a shuttle that won't rattle apart on takeoff.
Going back to capsule technology means going back to monolithic heat shields and sidesteps the vibration problems. There is nothing on an Apollo-like capsule that could rattle off.
Listen to Python or Ruby folks talk about how much more productive they are in those languages versus Java or C++. There is a reason for that. It's because those languages are more like Lisp.
Well, yes, that's sort of true in a roundabout way. Since Perl borrowed a number of things from Lisp. And junior programmers are more productive in Python and Ruby (than Java or C++) because those languages are like Perl with training wheels.
<rd&g>
Lynn exposed a serious security flaw that could have been used to compromise networks throughout the nation.
Your use of the past conditional tense seems presumptious. We do not know whether anyone or any agency has been exploiting this flaw. All we know is that there have not yet been any public failures in attempting to exploit this flaw.