If they used, say Ubuntu, they would have to retrain the personnel every time GNOME or Ubuntu folks decide it's a good idea to rethink the whole UI design and human-machine interaction mechanisms. Regardless of whether the new design is or is not better than the old one, it still needs retraining. Retraining = cost. So no, I think that sticking with their own flavor was an excellent idea.
Funny thing is, medicine is synonymous with poison.
No it's not. Farmaca ("drugs") are synonymous with poison, due to the origin of pharmaceutical substances as poisons, taken under the assumption that they would do more damage to the cause of the host problem than they would do damage to the host (and to the damage the cause of the host problem is causing to the host). There are aspects and form of medicine however that are quite distant from this approach.
He predicted a a quake along the FAULT.. And he was correct.
He predicted an earthquake at the wrong time in the wrong place, like he had already done in the past. The guy in question has a statistically significant history of false positive predictions in his past, except that this time the error was geologically small, and still an order of magnitude too large for any effective civil protection.
He is doing this by measuring rapid changes in the release of Radon gas. His basic working theory is sound, in so much that rapid changes in the release of gasses (using Radon because of past measurements and the ease to measure) along a fault line indicates rapid and large movement in the deep geological formations along the fault lines.
He believes, and he seems to be correct that a network of Radon measurement stations along fault lines could provide a statistically useful way to predict quakes.
Since when a 75% false positive rate is statistically significant?
The crime is (apparently) that they failed to provide sufficient and consistent information for everyone to ignore.
Easy solution: point out Mt. Vesuvius, and tell the populace to follow what happened in AD 79.
If you want sufficient and consistent information, don't sue the people who have devoted their entire lives to doing so, otherwise you'll be left doing it the old fashioned way, not having any information at all.
The scientists in question not only failed to provide consistent and reliable information, they were told by the government to do so. So much for their dedication to truth. They also helped silence one of their own who refused to toe the government line. If you want to hold up scientists as shining examples of integrity, these are the wrong ones, dude.
If by "one of their own who refused to toe the government line" you're referring to Giampaolo Giuliani, you should keep in mind that the person in question is a ignorant, preposterous asshole with a penchant for conspirational victimism. He's the guy that maintains that he had predicted when and where the "big one" would have hit in that string of tremors, while his predictions were wrong by as much as a week (in time) and around 100km (IIRC; I'd have to check again, been some time since I debated the last time with someone actually believing his crap): errors which are insignificant in geological scales, but are enormously significant in terms of civil protection: had the DPC actually taken action to move the population following Giuliani's warning, the death toll could have been much higher than what it has been (think about it: you move people 100km away from the forecast epicenter location, and they end up being closer to the actual epicenter than they were originally).
There is a lot of blame that can be distributed around for what happened in L'Aquila, but what the inhabitants are looking for is a big, flashy scape goat rather than the actual responsible for the scale and dimension of the damage. Hitting the seismologist is probably just part of a bigger control strong-arming that is currently going on between the DPC and the research institutions that do the actual data collection and analysis (among other things). So while the populace is looking for a scape goat, the ones actually responsible for the damage will carry o their own way.
Most of the earthquake damage was actually concentrated on two kinds of buildings: very new ones, which built on the cheap and without respecting the anti-seismic criteria which are obligatory when building in areas (such as that one) which are known to be at high seismic risk, and very old ones: in these cases, what happened was that some buildings had "custom changes" done by their more modern inhabitants, changes that (not intentionally) significantly weakened their structure, causing them them to fall and to bat against other buildings that would have managed to resist otherwise (domino effect).
The lead responsibility for the actual damage rests mainly on two actors: a number of builders and contractors (the most infamous of which is Impregilo, which is rather well known to operate mostly by corruption —corruption to win contracts, corruption to get paid more than their job is worth, corruption for getting paid without actually doing the work, and so on and so forth—) and the actual local population. The fault does rest on the DPC shoulders because of it being the government agency specifically tasked with prevention and intervention in case of disaster, a task which it was quite obviously incapable of fulfilling correctly: not because of it's failure in communicating correctly with the population "in time", but because of the failure to exert the appropriate control for the whole 20-year span before the earthquake: prevention means checking that the new buildings do satisfy the anti-seismic criteria they are suppos
For servers, almost everything is running on VMs now. More power per CPU is very welcome there, since you can run faster/more VMs per box. The less heat you produce, the more servers you can put in a data center. Given the cost for real estate at prime interconnect sites, it's profitable to go green, even if you're not a tree hugging hippie.
Hm, actually, if you're going to have a pile of heavy-duty VMs running concurrently, a higher number of slightly less powerful cores are going to be much better than a lower number of more powerful cores, so that's another of those cases where the Phenom might be more convenient.
You have obviously never been on a *huge* software development project. The reason you use accessors and mutators (getters & setters) is so you can change the underlying representation without breaking all the uses in you million lines of code.I've had to make changes to underlying representation without breaking th client contract (signature). This is why such practices are used (plus, these methods are auto-generated by most tools anyway).
Well, in Ruby (which is a fully OOPL) getters and setters are used too, but the language syntax allows you to define methods such as 'property' and 'property=' so that setters and getters look exactly like direct access, and much less verbose than the dreadful getPropX() and setPropX() methods you usually have in Java or C++.
Since when do EU regulations apply to Switzerland? AFAICS the treaties between EU and CH would not imply that Switzerland had to follow the prospected ban on combustion engines being discussed here
Do you know anyone that has actually tried developing for MeeGo?
Apparently the WeTab has MeeGo installed, and a bunch of software do go with it, so somebody must be. (And if they didn't only sell in Germany and the Netherlands, I would be as well).
I know there's lots of google fan boys on Slashdot, but I find it frightening that Chrome use has been growing so much. Google already has a very powerful market presence on the web, and I don't think putting them in charge of your browser is a good idea. They are a corporation for profit, and hence inherently evil, like any machine that cares about nothing but profit would inherently be.
The choice to use Firefox is obvious because it's the best browser. But people should stick with Firefox anyway because it's OPEN SOURCE, and no corporation could abuse the power of it's market share for that fact alone.
You do know that Google Chrome is a branded (and who-knows-how-changed) version of the OPEN SOURCE Chromium, right?
As for the choice to use Firefox being obvious because it's the best browser... funny, for me it's only the third choice (the first being Opera, which is leaving me quite disgruntled due to the rendering bugs and memory leaks that started showing up in version 11, the second being Chromium, i.e. the open source browser on which Google Chrome is based, and Firefox being only the last option if nothing else works).
That's not true. IE got the dominance because IE6 was the best browser at the time, others didn't come even close to it in regards of speed, memory usage and ability to render pages properly.
When IE6 came out, there were already faster, more compact browsers which had better standard compliance (e.g. Opera, which went ad-supported by 2000, IE6 came out in 2001). The only true part in your statement is "the ability to render pages properly", and even that is only true because pages were actually designed to be viewed with IE (so obviously they rendered better in that non-standard-compliant browser).
Note that at the time the only real challenger for IE was Netscape
The only famous challenger was Netscape. Which is exactly the kind of thing that a browser ballot could have solved at the time.
Maybe if you don't understand why the rest of the world likes it, the problem is with you not them.
Please note that I never said anything about the quality of the iPhone wrt the alternatives. I just pointed out that the number argument is barely a mark for the quality of the product. If you want to argue about the quality of something, do it on the technical merit, not on the number of people using it.
I'm referring to the plugins directory under my home directory that allows me to install codecs for myself without root.
Which doesn't work if your user account is subject to Software Restriction Policies under Windows or a home directory mounted noexec under Linux or *BSD. This might be the case in a public library, Internet cafe, or workplace. In such a situation, all plug-ins must be installed system-wide by an administrator.
I have no idea about SRP in Windows, but mounting noexec under Linux shouldn't prevent plugins from being loaded, since they are not executables but shared objects.
Plugins have existed since the earliest days of browsers (like quicktime plugin to view embedded movies)(or wav plugin to deal with sounds). Why do you think that is an inferior method?
Don't the precessions influence the relative position of the sun and Earth in a way that would be significant after 10k years, meaning that something on Earth aligned with a specific Sun position at a specific time of the year now would not be valid 10k years ago, and conversely?
Yes, but that only changes the positions relative to the stars. Precession means the rotation axis of the earth changes the way it points, but the axis is the same. North is always the same direction, apart from a relatively small polar motion.
There is also a precession of the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, such that the path over long periods of time looks more like the petals of a flower than the same ellipse being run over and over again. I suspect that would alter the alignment of Earth-based object with respect to the Sun at specific times of the year. I'm not sure though.
Well I agree it doesn't look like much, but then again it's 10,000 years old. That's much older than most other such remnants in the world. Either way, it's definitely not natural. Humans did this. The question is: for what purpose?
If it does align perfectly on the with the sun on the solstices, then this becomes very interesting. The likelihood that humans happened to place the rocks on that exact alignment by pure chance (as opposed to any other random alignment) is small.
Was the alignment correct 10k years ago? Don't the precessions influence the relative position of the sun and Earth in a way that would be significant after 10k years, meaning that something on Earth aligned with a specific Sun position at a specific time of the year now would not be valid 10k years ago, and conversely?
Slashdot Mirror
If they used, say Ubuntu, they would have to retrain the personnel every time GNOME or Ubuntu folks decide it's a good idea to rethink the whole UI design and human-machine interaction mechanisms. Regardless of whether the new design is or is not better than the old one, it still needs retraining. Retraining = cost. So no, I think that sticking with their own flavor was an excellent idea.
Funny thing is, medicine is synonymous with poison.
No it's not. Farmaca ("drugs") are synonymous with poison, due to the origin of pharmaceutical substances as poisons, taken under the assumption that they would do more damage to the cause of the host problem than they would do damage to the host (and to the damage the cause of the host problem is causing to the host). There are aspects and form of medicine however that are quite distant from this approach.
Someone want to translate the summary? Or is this to be more evidence of lousy content and even worse editting? "as learnt" really?
Really. "learnt" is actually correct in this place, even though in the USA you're trying to get rid of these more sophisticated verb forms.
He predicted a a quake along the FAULT.. And he was correct.
He predicted an earthquake at the wrong time in the wrong place, like he had already done in the past. The guy in question has a statistically significant history of false positive predictions in his past, except that this time the error was geologically small, and still an order of magnitude too large for any effective civil protection.
He is doing this by measuring rapid changes in the release of Radon gas. His basic working theory is sound, in so much that rapid changes in the release of gasses (using Radon because of past measurements and the ease to measure) along a fault line indicates rapid and large movement in the deep geological formations along the fault lines.
He believes, and he seems to be correct that a network of Radon measurement stations along fault lines could provide a statistically useful way to predict quakes.
Since when a 75% false positive rate is statistically significant?
They say they're trying to hold government agents responsible for not carrying out their mission? No wonder they're being internationally condemned.
The question is not if the government agents should be tried, it's why involve the scientists too.
... and in this case he turned out to be entirely correct.
Nope, he was wrong by a week and by over 50km. He also has a rather long string of false positive predictions in similar situations on his shoulder.
The crime is (apparently) that they failed to provide sufficient and consistent information for everyone to ignore.
Easy solution: point out Mt. Vesuvius, and tell the populace to follow what happened in AD 79.
If you want sufficient and consistent information, don't sue the people who have devoted their entire lives to doing so, otherwise you'll be left doing it the old fashioned way, not having any information at all.
The scientists in question not only failed to provide consistent and reliable information, they were told by the government to do so. So much for their dedication to truth. They also helped silence one of their own who refused to toe the government line. If you want to hold up scientists as shining examples of integrity, these are the wrong ones, dude.
If by "one of their own who refused to toe the government line" you're referring to Giampaolo Giuliani, you should keep in mind that the person in question is a ignorant, preposterous asshole with a penchant for conspirational victimism. He's the guy that maintains that he had predicted when and where the "big one" would have hit in that string of tremors, while his predictions were wrong by as much as a week (in time) and around 100km (IIRC; I'd have to check again, been some time since I debated the last time with someone actually believing his crap): errors which are insignificant in geological scales, but are enormously significant in terms of civil protection: had the DPC actually taken action to move the population following Giuliani's warning, the death toll could have been much higher than what it has been (think about it: you move people 100km away from the forecast epicenter location, and they end up being closer to the actual epicenter than they were originally).
There is a lot of blame that can be distributed around for what happened in L'Aquila, but what the inhabitants are looking for is a big, flashy scape goat rather than the actual responsible for the scale and dimension of the damage. Hitting the seismologist is probably just part of a bigger control strong-arming that is currently going on between the DPC and the research institutions that do the actual data collection and analysis (among other things). So while the populace is looking for a scape goat, the ones actually responsible for the damage will carry o their own way.
Most of the earthquake damage was actually concentrated on two kinds of buildings: very new ones, which built on the cheap and without respecting the anti-seismic criteria which are obligatory when building in areas (such as that one) which are known to be at high seismic risk, and very old ones: in these cases, what happened was that some buildings had "custom changes" done by their more modern inhabitants, changes that (not intentionally) significantly weakened their structure, causing them them to fall and to bat against other buildings that would have managed to resist otherwise (domino effect).
The lead responsibility for the actual damage rests mainly on two actors: a number of builders and contractors (the most infamous of which is Impregilo, which is rather well known to operate mostly by corruption —corruption to win contracts, corruption to get paid more than their job is worth, corruption for getting paid without actually doing the work, and so on and so forth—) and the actual local population. The fault does rest on the DPC shoulders because of it being the government agency specifically tasked with prevention and intervention in case of disaster, a task which it was quite obviously incapable of fulfilling correctly: not because of it's failure in communicating correctly with the population "in time", but because of the failure to exert the appropriate control for the whole 20-year span before the earthquake: prevention means checking that the new buildings do satisfy the anti-seismic criteria they are suppos
"Capitalism is the worst form of economics ever invented, except for everything else that's ever been tried."
That's actually a paraphrasing of Churchill's saying on democracy
Hm, actually, if you're going to have a pile of heavy-duty VMs running concurrently, a higher number of slightly less powerful cores are going to be much better than a lower number of more powerful cores, so that's another of those cases where the Phenom might be more convenient.
Something à la CC-BY-SA?
Mod parent up, this new one, as good as it is, is not the first live-action Portal thing
You have obviously never been on a *huge* software development project. The reason you use accessors and mutators (getters & setters) is so you can change the underlying representation without breaking all the uses in you million lines of code.I've had to make changes to underlying representation without breaking th client contract (signature). This is why such practices are used (plus, these methods are auto-generated by most tools anyway).
Well, in Ruby (which is a fully OOPL) getters and setters are used too, but the language syntax allows you to define methods such as 'property' and 'property=' so that setters and getters look exactly like direct access, and much less verbose than the dreadful getPropX() and setPropX() methods you usually have in Java or C++.
granted salt water and steel wire mix like spaghetti and tuna fish
Spaghetti and tuna are an excellent combination. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVY5nobY4Sw
2. Switzerland
Since when do EU regulations apply to Switzerland? AFAICS the treaties between EU and CH would not imply that Switzerland had to follow the prospected ban on combustion engines being discussed here
Do you know anyone that has actually tried developing for MeeGo?
Apparently the WeTab has MeeGo installed, and a bunch of software do go with it, so somebody must be. (And if they didn't only sell in Germany and the Netherlands, I would be as well).
I know there's lots of google fan boys on Slashdot, but I find it frightening that Chrome use has been growing so much. Google already has a very powerful market presence on the web, and I don't think putting them in charge of your browser is a good idea. They are a corporation for profit, and hence inherently evil, like any machine that cares about nothing but profit would inherently be.
The choice to use Firefox is obvious because it's the best browser. But people should stick with Firefox anyway because it's OPEN SOURCE, and no corporation could abuse the power of it's market share for that fact alone.
You do know that Google Chrome is a branded (and who-knows-how-changed) version of the OPEN SOURCE Chromium, right?
As for the choice to use Firefox being obvious because it's the best browser ... funny, for me it's only the third choice (the first being Opera, which is leaving me quite disgruntled due to the rendering bugs and memory leaks that started showing up in version 11, the second being Chromium, i.e. the open source browser on which Google Chrome is based, and Firefox being only the last option if nothing else works).
That's not true. IE got the dominance because IE6 was the best browser at the time, others didn't come even close to it in regards of speed, memory usage and ability to render pages properly.
When IE6 came out, there were already faster, more compact browsers which had better standard compliance (e.g. Opera, which went ad-supported by 2000, IE6 came out in 2001). The only true part in your statement is "the ability to render pages properly", and even that is only true because pages were actually designed to be viewed with IE (so obviously they rendered better in that non-standard-compliant browser).
Note that at the time the only real challenger for IE was Netscape
The only famous challenger was Netscape. Which is exactly the kind of thing that a browser ballot could have solved at the time.
Maybe if you don't understand why the rest of the world likes it, the problem is with you not them.
Please note that I never said anything about the quality of the iPhone wrt the alternatives. I just pointed out that the number argument is barely a mark for the quality of the product. If you want to argue about the quality of something, do it on the technical merit, not on the number of people using it.
From a relatively free Maemo platform to a walled garden is not an improvement.
So says you. The 30 million iPhone 4 owners seem to disagree.
aka "Eat shit, 50 billions of flies can't be wrong"
I'm referring to the plugins directory under my home directory that allows me to install codecs for myself without root.
Which doesn't work if your user account is subject to Software Restriction Policies under Windows or a home directory mounted noexec under Linux or *BSD. This might be the case in a public library, Internet cafe, or workplace. In such a situation, all plug-ins must be installed system-wide by an administrator.
I have no idea about SRP in Windows, but mounting noexec under Linux shouldn't prevent plugins from being loaded, since they are not executables but shared objects.
Maybe I should just install Plan9 on my Nokia phone instead, skipping all of these options?
wait, 0x9 0xC
Why wasn't I informed that Nokia had already made Plan9 phones???
There's also http://nokiaplan9.com/ in fact
Plugins have existed since the earliest days of browsers (like quicktime plugin to view embedded movies)(or wav plugin to deal with sounds). Why do you think that is an inferior method?
Because only root can install plug-ins,
Bullshit.
My username on every other site is hunter2, so it just comes up as asterisks anyway.
I wonder how many caught the reference
Don't the precessions influence the relative position of the sun and Earth in a way that would be significant after 10k years, meaning that something on Earth aligned with a specific Sun position at a specific time of the year now would not be valid 10k years ago, and conversely?
Yes, but that only changes the positions relative to the stars. Precession means the rotation axis of the earth changes the way it points, but the axis is the same. North is always the same direction, apart from a relatively small polar motion.
There is also a precession of the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, such that the path over long periods of time looks more like the petals of a flower than the same ellipse being run over and over again. I suspect that would alter the alignment of Earth-based object with respect to the Sun at specific times of the year. I'm not sure though.
Well I agree it doesn't look like much, but then again it's 10,000 years old. That's much older than most other such remnants in the world. Either way, it's definitely not natural. Humans did this. The question is: for what purpose?
If it does align perfectly on the with the sun on the solstices, then this becomes very interesting. The likelihood that humans happened to place the rocks on that exact alignment by pure chance (as opposed to any other random alignment) is small.
Was the alignment correct 10k years ago? Don't the precessions influence the relative position of the sun and Earth in a way that would be significant after 10k years, meaning that something on Earth aligned with a specific Sun position at a specific time of the year now would not be valid 10k years ago, and conversely?