I've read of using classical music to ward off the unwanted teen crowd at convenience stores. It seems a bit more humane and appropriately selective - in that it can serve as a cultural experience for those who don't mind it, and one might think those people would be more socially acceptable than those who loathe classical music.
Testing techniques abound - unit testing, integration testing, data flow testing, and mutation testing to name a few. Scripting tests makes them repeatable, and if we test and test again, we can have some certainty of the reliability of the software. How? Software reliability engineering. See the book by John D. Musa. (See his web site, too.) It's all about using statistics and probability to analyze the likelihood of another failure in a certain amount of time. We all know it's cheaper to fix a problem earlier, so it's best to design the system so that, given the frequency of observed failures during testing and the cost of a failure, you set an acceptable risk and build the software to match the risk.
ROTFL! For those who didn't get it 232.78*9/5+32=451, the kindling temperature of paper in Fahrenheit, and that leads us to a popular Ray Bradbury novel about a society that burns all the books - wheren the citizens (who care about knowledge) must preserve the knowledge by memorizing their favorite books. The title: Fahrenheit 451. If you haven't already, read it now.
In my professional geek career, I have yet to met a business that could top VeriSign's ability to cause grief, stress, development delays, and outrageous legal fees.
I dunno, when I was trying to work with Pitney Bowes over a postage meter and scale for small business, talking to customer service seemed like fighting with a tar baby. We returned the scale that was included as part of the package because it cost something like $5/month to lease (which we thought was absurd since we could buy a scale just like it for $50). They said they hadn't received it and continued to charge us the extra fee. We tracked the shipmenet and went 'round and 'round with customer service until they finally got it right - but we spent way more in hourly wages straightening out the mess than we saved by returning the scale!
Anyhow, the point is, yes, customer service can stink. I'm pretty sure today's model is, "Build a product and hope it works. Throw in a customer service department to keep the idiots happy, and hope they do a good job, and if they don't, push the complaints back to the coders/factory/whatever." The problem with the model is that we can engineer better solutions if we put our minds to it.
I subscribed to Popular Science for a couple of years while I was in college (91-96), and I eventually cancelled the subscription because I tired of all the "blow-in" cards that inevitably came with the rag. To this day, the first thing I do with a new magazine is remove all the cardstock advertisements and recycle them - not unlike blocking the pop-up ads.
Fortunately, magazines have yet to implement flashing and sound in their regular page adverisements, and they typically don't use fluorescent inks for the ads, but if there's a big ad section in my way in a magazine, I still may pull it out. My web ad blocking habits are similar.
While it is great that I can choose from 300 different distributions I have to ask the question: how many of them don't suck? About 5 to 10 would probably be the answer.
I'm sure if you and I tried to figure out separately which 5 to 10 of an agreed list of 300 (or so) distros don't suck, we'd have different lists - because we have different needs. I want something I can turn on and run - with minimal effort. I know how to configure Samba and NFS and all the other fun stuff, but I don't want to have to spend time doing it at my house because I already spend enough time on that sort of thing at work. Diversity improves our chances of finding a few good distros.
It's great that people want to help it's just a shame there are a lot of people that feel the only wheel they can use is the one they built themselves.
I can see why it happens. Folks read Slashdot and see "Behold the Debian wheel" and "Behold the RedHat wheel"... so I try running Debian and RedHat, and find that one is square and the other is a pentagon. Yes, they can be forced to roll, but it takes quite a bit of pushing. I'm looking for something closer to an octagon, or even better, a dodecagon (12 sides). In fact, I wouldn't object to a circular wheel, but I don't think we have it yet. Different people see different problems with each distro, and some choose to make their own distros to round out those edges. With enough effort, I will find my dodecagon!
Exactly. The FCC cannot overrule the fifth amendment of the Constitution which states, in part:
"No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself...."
Yes, they're proposing (and presently seeking comment) requiring VOIP providers with links to POTS lines to permit tapping of calls just as the landline folks do, but they're using the POTS interface as a separator between "big companies" and "little guys" and the little guys won't be required to comply. (At least that's what I got from skimming TFNotice.)
Name something they brought down back from space that is worth all of the trouble we've gone through to glide back to Earth rather than parachute.
LDEF was pretty cool. Besides that, they haul trash back from the space station;-).
I agree that the Shuttle isn't all it was planned to be. (The designs of the '70s thought it wouldbe much cheaper per pound to orbit than it wound up being, for example.) What we need, besides a fancy space pickup truck is a crew vehicle and a heavy lift vehicle. As soon as we have those in place, we can spend some serious time contemplating other propulsion methods, because we'll only make space travel more frequent if we can also make it more economical. What percentage of your car's weight is fuel? (Hint: about 10% when full.) What percentage of the Shuttle's weight is fuel? (Hint: about 97%)
I don't know where the typewriters got off to, but I know why VHS is still big in the U.S. Consider, as but one example, the immigrant workers who live six in an 800 sq. ft. (75 sq. meters) apartment. Consider the transit bus drivers who make $7-$14 per hour and run a household on that. They quite simply don't have the disposable income to put into a DVD player or buying a DVD, but they must have something to babysit the kids - and VHS can do the trick.
I did a paper diary at Nielson's request some years ago - perhaps in 2000 - and they paid a whopping $1 for the data. We wrote down what shows we actually watched, those that were on but nobody was particularly watching, and the shows we liked that we didn't get a chance to watch. We also noted which shows we recorded (by VCR at the time) for later viewing. We didn't expend effort watch everything we like, we just did our usual stuff.
I imagine they have different tiers - people paid $1 are differently motivated than people paid $5. Likewise, people with a set-top box (or a DVR) report different informaiton than those who write it all down. (TiVo switches back to playing live TV after a little while - whether the TV is on or not, nevermind if someone is in the room or not.)
I do some work in this field, so I at least know where to start looking. The Energy Information Administration uses the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) to model 25 years into the future based on costs of production, new installations, and so on, for all sources and destinations of energy. You can look at their formulas to get an idea of the cost.
We would need to add a capacity of 276 terawatt hours, but because we've only seen 90% capacity from the existing plants, we need about 300 terawatt hours. Building "advanced nuclear" plants cost about $2117 per kwhr [1], so we would expect to pay about $600 trillion for the plants. (If we started building in 2002 and finished in 2007.) Economies of scale would likely cut that number by a significant factor - let's guess 10 - and we're still looking at $60 trillion, or about 30 years' worth of the federal budget at present spending rates.
Further calculations - the costs of converting virtually all our energy to electricity, losses related to storage, and so forth are left as an exercise to the reader.
Lawrence-Berkeley Labs also runs NEMS and has produced some reports that may be of interest.
Yes. Create an account (perhaps a special one for your PDA), go to preferences, select "skins", then choose "MySkin". That one puts the information at top and the nav links at the bottom of a very simple display.
You might be able to find something on your county board of elections web site or your secretary of state web site. (Newton doesn't have much on the web, except this: "Election results from the November 2, 2004, general election in Newton County will be projected in the comissioners' board room in the historic courthouse beginning at approximately 9:00 P.M. on November 2, 2004." But the web site does show a pet of the week, a goat.)
Wikipedia's article U.S. presidential election, 2004 answers the higher bandwidth question quite thoroughly -
with results (updated frequently) and links to a host of sites that will report the
results as they come in. Don't expect much before 23:00 GMT since that's when the first of the polls close.
There were other glaring problems, too. From the presentation slides, it looks like the temperature varied as a function of time through the course of a day - cool in the morning and warm in the afternoon (slide 11). Furthermore, this was at an insurance company, and based on the time/activity graphs, I'd be willing to bet they do some auto insurance claims processing since activity was at its morning and afternoon peaks shortly after rush hour (slide 15). Humidity, temperature, and productivity spiked in the afternoon about 6:45 - perhaps agents were sweating over claims?
I'm not really sure what, if anything, we can take away from this study, other than that someone hypothesized that efficiency might be related to temperature.
Still, I definately work best at around 25deg C. The freezing office I work in makes my fingers to stiff to type properly.
25C in the office wouldn't be so bad, but I just want the temperature in the office to be predictable so I can dress appropriately. My co-workers suspect the thermostats are all decoys to fool us into thinking we have some control over the temperature. We have not observed any effect on the temperature from changing the thermostat.
My office at 36 degrees north is perpetually opposite of the outdoors, for which the landlord pays dearly, serving to thwart nature and make the tennants uncomfortable. Our neighbors in nearby buildings probably wonder why I step outside when it's 80F (27C) wearing a jacket. Of course, in the winter, I have to bring removable layers to accomodate the warmth!
My boss often said he'd rather have it cold than hot since you can bundle against cold but can't help the heat. Then again, Paul Harvey said the number one complaint about the workplace is that it's too cold. The number 2 complaint: "too hot."
You would trust a piece of paper more than an electronic system?
Yes, because I can watch the paper myself, with my own eyes. Anyone can guard the ballot box, too. The electronic system cannot be so carefully guarded against nefarious programming or vote tampering. Paper can tell how it has been produced and handled when inspected closely enough, but bits do not track their history. So yes, I trust paper more.
See Rebecca Mercuri's Statement on Electronic Voting for details. Mercuri was one of the first on the scene after the Florida election glitch in the 2000 Presidential election because she'd already written a Ph.D. dissertation on electronic voting. Few people had expressed interest before then.
In electronic voting, votes are completely orthogonal. You either vote FOR someone or AGAINST someone; there are no hanging chads.
Direct Recording Electronic, internet, and telephone voting (see electronic voting) do not allow for the voter to be ambiguous, but mark-sense and punch card voting both can have problems with ambiguity. There are benefits and drawbacks to each type of voting.
Also, the possibility of votes being changed while being transmitted can be reduced to practically nothing by using cryptographic techniches along with well-known channel coding schemes.
This is good - but the real challenge when we start to use cryptographic solutions to voting problems is that most people don't understand how it works. Consider David Chaum's brilliant scheme for allowing you to take a recipt to verify that your actual vote was counted, but to not reveal how you voted unless you happen to have that other piece of paper that you destroyed at the ballot box. It's a beautiful system for verifyability, but it falls flat because a room full of computer scientists don't understand it in minutes - so the average election supervisor surely won't understand it in a few hours.
I wouldn't say I have a fear of electronic voting systems. I simply have a fear of trusting my votes to a computer running a program written by a fallable, corruptable human being on a system designed and built by the same sort of human - and depending on all of it to work reliably without any sort of audit trail.
Electronic voting in the U.S. is only slightly different from that in India. The systems in India have simpler hardware and software, leading me to trust them more - but still not as much as a piece of paper.
India's system is a simple box that counts. The system in the U.S. is typically more like an automated teller machine (ATM) with a computer behind it.
The Mercuri method of electronic voting allows the voter to inspect a paper printout of the cast ballot before it lands in the box for use only in the event of a recount. Brazil (and other places) use it. I would like to see it in use wherever direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting is used.
The big quirk in the United States is the decentrallized nature of the voting systems - every county (of which there are about 3400) selects its own voting machines, ballots, and so forth.
I'm glad you've found an outlet for your frustrations by subscribing me to miscellaneous e-mail lists in lieu of hacking my web site, though I'm not sure what set you off so badly. I pray that the busy, commercialized city life does not harden your heart too much, and that the grace and peace of God (by whatever name) may comfort you.
This will make for excellent driver behavior modification. In the town where I used to live, people habitually stopped their cars in the intersections for red lights (just past the stop bar). When they put in sensors, people quickly figured out they needed to stop on the sensor - which was where the car was supposed to be in the first place. Likewise, if speeding produces no benefit, people will stop speeding.
As for running red lights, cameras can mete out punishment for that, too.
When I lived in North Alabama and the area code changed to 256, I quickly snapped up the number 256-512-1024 for my pager. No extra charge (except $10 for changing my pager number). Likewise, when I signed up for cell phones, I chose the last 4 digits to spell what I want. Aside from the pager number, I haven't gotten any really sweet numbers that way. Perhaps you can pay more and get a niftier number, but I haven't been that determined.
Please forgive my ignorance, but why can't you make the circuit with 3 components in series - the power supply, a 10k potentiometer (or an appropriately sized resistor for the second incarnation), and the battery tester?
Slashdot Mirror
I've read of using classical music to ward off the unwanted teen crowd at convenience stores. It seems a bit more humane and appropriately selective - in that it can serve as a cultural experience for those who don't mind it, and one might think those people would be more socially acceptable than those who loathe classical music.
Testing techniques abound - unit testing, integration testing, data flow testing, and mutation testing to name a few. Scripting tests makes them repeatable, and if we test and test again, we can have some certainty of the reliability of the software. How? Software reliability engineering. See the book by John D. Musa. (See his web site, too.) It's all about using statistics and probability to analyze the likelihood of another failure in a certain amount of time. We all know it's cheaper to fix a problem earlier, so it's best to design the system so that, given the frequency of observed failures during testing and the cost of a failure, you set an acceptable risk and build the software to match the risk.
Yes, if you keep clicking on the links from blog to blog, you will find the actual patent links.
/. readers on a wlid goose chase.
It would be helpful if submitters included such links directly rather than sending all the interested
ROTFL! For those who didn't get it 232.78*9/5+32=451, the kindling temperature of paper in Fahrenheit, and that leads us to a popular Ray Bradbury novel about a society that burns all the books - wheren the citizens (who care about knowledge) must preserve the knowledge by memorizing their favorite books. The title: Fahrenheit 451. If you haven't already, read it now.
Anyhow, the point is, yes, customer service can stink. I'm pretty sure today's model is, "Build a product and hope it works. Throw in a customer service department to keep the idiots happy, and hope they do a good job, and if they don't, push the complaints back to the coders/factory/whatever." The problem with the model is that we can engineer better solutions if we put our minds to it.
I subscribed to Popular Science for a couple of years while I was in college (91-96), and I eventually cancelled the subscription because I tired of all the "blow-in" cards that inevitably came with the rag. To this day, the first thing I do with a new magazine is remove all the cardstock advertisements and recycle them - not unlike blocking the pop-up ads.
Fortunately, magazines have yet to implement flashing and sound in their regular page adverisements, and they typically don't use fluorescent inks for the ads, but if there's a big ad section in my way in a magazine, I still may pull it out. My web ad blocking habits are similar.
Exactly. The FCC cannot overrule the fifth amendment of the Constitution which states, in part:
"No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself...."
Yes, they're proposing (and presently seeking comment) requiring VOIP providers with links to POTS lines to permit tapping of calls just as the landline folks do, but they're using the POTS interface as a separator between "big companies" and "little guys" and the little guys won't be required to comply. (At least that's what I got from skimming TFNotice.)
http://video.google.com/
I agree that the Shuttle isn't all it was planned to be. (The designs of the '70s thought it wouldbe much cheaper per pound to orbit than it wound up being, for example.) What we need, besides a fancy space pickup truck is a crew vehicle and a heavy lift vehicle. As soon as we have those in place, we can spend some serious time contemplating other propulsion methods, because we'll only make space travel more frequent if we can also make it more economical. What percentage of your car's weight is fuel? (Hint: about 10% when full.) What percentage of the Shuttle's weight is fuel? (Hint: about 97%)
I don't know where the typewriters got off to, but I know why VHS is still big in the U.S. Consider, as but one example, the immigrant workers who live six in an 800 sq. ft. (75 sq. meters) apartment. Consider the transit bus drivers who make $7-$14 per hour and run a household on that. They quite simply don't have the disposable income to put into a DVD player or buying a DVD, but they must have something to babysit the kids - and VHS can do the trick.
I did a paper diary at Nielson's request some years ago - perhaps in 2000 - and they paid a whopping $1 for the data. We wrote down what shows we actually watched, those that were on but nobody was particularly watching, and the shows we liked that we didn't get a chance to watch. We also noted which shows we recorded (by VCR at the time) for later viewing. We didn't expend effort watch everything we like, we just did our usual stuff.
I imagine they have different tiers - people paid $1 are differently motivated than people paid $5. Likewise, people with a set-top box (or a DVR) report different informaiton than those who write it all down. (TiVo switches back to playing live TV after a little while - whether the TV is on or not, nevermind if someone is in the room or not.)
The Annual Energy Review offers a fascinating graph of our energy sources and destinations. We use about 1e+15 BTU, or 300 terawatt hours. We get roughly 8% of our energy from splitting atoms. We get about 75% from dinosaurs, of which roughly 30% is imported oil.
We would need to add a capacity of 276 terawatt hours, but because we've only seen 90% capacity from the existing plants, we need about 300 terawatt hours. Building "advanced nuclear" plants cost about $2117 per kwhr [1], so we would expect to pay about $600 trillion for the plants. (If we started building in 2002 and finished in 2007.) Economies of scale would likely cut that number by a significant factor - let's guess 10 - and we're still looking at $60 trillion, or about 30 years' worth of the federal budget at present spending rates.
Further calculations - the costs of converting virtually all our energy to electricity, losses related to storage, and so forth are left as an exercise to the reader.
Lawrence-Berkeley Labs also runs NEMS and has produced some reports that may be of interest.
Yes. Create an account (perhaps a special one for your PDA), go to preferences, select "skins", then choose "MySkin". That one puts the information at top and the nav links at the bottom of a very simple display.
You might be able to find something on your county board of elections web site or your secretary of state web site. (Newton doesn't have much on the web, except this: "Election results from the November 2, 2004, general election in Newton County will be projected in the comissioners' board room in the historic courthouse beginning at approximately 9:00 P.M. on November 2, 2004." But the web site does show a pet of the week, a goat.)
Wikipedia's article U.S. presidential election, 2004 answers the higher bandwidth question quite thoroughly - with results (updated frequently) and links to a host of sites that will report the results as they come in. Don't expect much before 23:00 GMT since that's when the first of the polls close.
I'm not really sure what, if anything, we can take away from this study, other than that someone hypothesized that efficiency might be related to temperature.
25C in the office wouldn't be so bad, but I just want the temperature in the office to be predictable so I can dress appropriately. My co-workers suspect the thermostats are all decoys to fool us into thinking we have some control over the temperature. We have not observed any effect on the temperature from changing the thermostat.
My office at 36 degrees north is perpetually opposite of the outdoors, for which the landlord pays dearly, serving to thwart nature and make the tennants uncomfortable. Our neighbors in nearby buildings probably wonder why I step outside when it's 80F (27C) wearing a jacket. Of course, in the winter, I have to bring removable layers to accomodate the warmth!
My boss often said he'd rather have it cold than hot since you can bundle against cold but can't help the heat. Then again, Paul Harvey said the number one complaint about the workplace is that it's too cold. The number 2 complaint: "too hot."
Yes, because I can watch the paper myself, with my own eyes. Anyone can guard the ballot box, too. The electronic system cannot be so carefully guarded against nefarious programming or vote tampering. Paper can tell how it has been produced and handled when inspected closely enough, but bits do not track their history. So yes, I trust paper more.
See Rebecca Mercuri's Statement on Electronic Voting for details. Mercuri was one of the first on the scene after the Florida election glitch in the 2000 Presidential election because she'd already written a Ph.D. dissertation on electronic voting. Few people had expressed interest before then.
Direct Recording Electronic, internet, and telephone voting (see electronic voting) do not allow for the voter to be ambiguous, but mark-sense and punch card voting both can have problems with ambiguity. There are benefits and drawbacks to each type of voting. This is good - but the real challenge when we start to use cryptographic solutions to voting problems is that most people don't understand how it works. Consider David Chaum's brilliant scheme for allowing you to take a recipt to verify that your actual vote was counted, but to not reveal how you voted unless you happen to have that other piece of paper that you destroyed at the ballot box. It's a beautiful system for verifyability, but it falls flat because a room full of computer scientists don't understand it in minutes - so the average election supervisor surely won't understand it in a few hours.I wouldn't say I have a fear of electronic voting systems. I simply have a fear of trusting my votes to a computer running a program written by a fallable, corruptable human being on a system designed and built by the same sort of human - and depending on all of it to work reliably without any sort of audit trail.
India's system is a simple box that counts. The system in the U.S. is typically more like an automated teller machine (ATM) with a computer behind it.
The Mercuri method of electronic voting allows the voter to inspect a paper printout of the cast ballot before it lands in the box for use only in the event of a recount. Brazil (and other places) use it. I would like to see it in use wherever direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting is used.
The big quirk in the United States is the decentrallized nature of the voting systems - every county (of which there are about 3400) selects its own voting machines, ballots, and so forth.
I'm glad you've found an outlet for your frustrations by subscribing me to miscellaneous e-mail lists in lieu of hacking my web site, though I'm not sure what set you off so badly. I pray that the busy, commercialized city life does not harden your heart too much, and that the grace and peace of God (by whatever name) may comfort you.
This will make for excellent driver behavior modification. In the town where I used to live, people habitually stopped their cars in the intersections for red lights (just past the stop bar). When they put in sensors, people quickly figured out they needed to stop on the sensor - which was where the car was supposed to be in the first place. Likewise, if speeding produces no benefit, people will stop speeding.
As for running red lights, cameras can mete out punishment for that, too.
When I lived in North Alabama and the area code changed to 256, I quickly snapped up the number 256-512-1024 for my pager. No extra charge (except $10 for changing my pager number). Likewise, when I signed up for cell phones, I chose the last 4 digits to spell what I want. Aside from the pager number, I haven't gotten any really sweet numbers that way. Perhaps you can pay more and get a niftier number, but I haven't been that determined.
[DeBeers has a stranglehold on the world's diamond mines, and as you'd expect, they have plenty of money - so it's privately held.]
Please forgive my ignorance, but why can't you make the circuit with 3 components in series - the power supply, a 10k potentiometer (or an appropriately sized resistor for the second incarnation), and the battery tester?