This story reminded me of 2008's White House press briefings, which regulary "edit" history to match the current political scene. Writing stuff in Wikipedia makes it true.
I'm responsible for maintenance and development of the online banking software for a mid-sized credit union. I'm currently in the midst of a project to integrate BioPassword's implementation of this technology as a second authentication factor in our online banking product, and while I initially had some skepticism of their claims, I can assure you that the technique is actually surprisingly effective, even for relatively inconsistent typists like myself.
Don't just take my word for it, though — BioPassword has an online demo that offers a good explanation of the technology, and a chance to try it out yourself: http://stage1.biopassword.com/democlient/
But even leaving aside questions of whether there are better ways to get slimmed-down Windows installs deployed to a large number of machines with minimal manual intervention (there are) your assumptions are still questionable. For one thing, there's a pretty good likelihood that any corporate IT department deploying Windows laptops in the first place will want the features of the business edition. So let's remove that from the cost of this "upgrade". Now we're down to $50. According to TFS, you can recoup another $25 of the cost with a few configuration options, so now we're down to as little as $25. (For an option that should be, and now is, free — but we'll leave that aside for the sake of discussion.) Using your math and your assumptions about parallelization, for n=10, you've saved about $150.
But what you're really failing to take into consideration, here, is the opportunity cost for this excercise in tedium. Presumably your highly-skilled IT staff are paid $50/hr to do something more useful and productive than mashing buttons — but for the last couple of hours, they haven't been doing it. That means you've effectively lost most of the salary you paid them for those hours, mitigated at best slightly by the benefit you gain from crapware-free laptops. At the end of the day, you've maybe broken even on this undertaking, and your IT guy has wasted hours of his life uninstalling Windows software. Under this scenario, are you sure you weren't better off just paying Sony their extortion fee?
Either your "IT guys" aren't getting paid enough, or you can't do basic math. Or you have a very different definition of "a large volume" than most IT shops do.
The hijacking of that idea and turning it into some kind of sexual movement is the work of marketers, who have successfully turned the movement into a cultural vehicle for selling ever more provocative clothing and products to an ever decreasing age range.
This is a non sequitur. You haven't even hinted at a plausible causitive relationship, let alone conclusively demonstrated its existence.
...Wait, who thought "women's liberation" (what's with the outdated terminology?) constituted dressing eight year olds in hotpants? Are you seriously claiming this practice is the result of feminism, and if so, can you tell me what the hell they're putting in the drinking water over there in Melbourne? Clearly you guys get better drugs than we do here in California.
Again, as noted further on in this thread: you might want to raise that complaint with Microformats.org in general, and David Janes in particular. Janes invented the hAtom microformat, around which WebSlices is based.
To be honest, though, I don't see how hAtom muddies the feed-standard waters any more than they were previously. It's intended to address a different problem space than RSS and Atom, so it's not really competing with either. The RSS/Atom issue, by contrast, arose from the introduction of competing standards to address the very same problem.
A more interesting issue is raised by Janes himself in the blog post linked above, namely Microsoft's decision to implement only a subset of hAtom as WebSlices, with their own top-level element to distinguish WebSlices from general hAtom feeds. I hope he makes his suggestions known to Microsoft, on this count, and I hope they listen.
Take it up with the Microformats folks. WebSlices are just an extension (and a fairly minor one) of the hAtom microformat. Most of your objections to WebSlices could be applied to microformats in general, or to any framework (jQuery, for instance) that uses class attributes for non-CSS semantic purposes.
About the only difference I see here is that the browser itself knows to take advantage of a microformat, and hopefully it's smart enough not to generate false positives from CSS classes with the same name. I can quickly think of a couple of easy ways to make that determination: namely, 1) look for the other required elements of the microformat ("entry-title", "entry-content", etc.), and 2) look for a CSS definition matching the class name. If the the other required elements don't exist in the correct relationship to the matched class, and a CSS rule with the same name exists, it probably wasn't intended as a WebSlice. That seems simple enough, and reasonably bulletproof — and if I could come up with it that easily, I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the IE8 team did as well.
Because a standard is a human production that has no physical reality, it is possible to fully comply with its every detail (assuming that it is a well-written standard).
And therein lies one hell of an operating assumption, WRT practically any standard generated by the W3C in the last decade. (CSS, DOM, XHTML, SVG... HTML 4.01 may well be the last thing they wrote that wasn't a complete fucking joke.)
What you call "worn out", I call "tacit acceptance". The day the Bush administration steps down from office is the day commentary, satirical or otherwise, on their actions and policies will become effectively moot — and not a day sooner. Should their actions really go unchallenged for the next ten months because everyone knows they're "douchebags", and is tired of hearing about it?
That something like the pathetic little chubby you get every time you attack someone on the internet from the safety of your anonymity, Mr. AC? I'm guessing you know more than a little of what you speak, and I don't mean Global Warming.
You have no evidence of such an occurrence in this case, and I'd challenge you to find conclusive and credible evidence of such a phenomenon in any other scientific consensus.
Boldly-worded Slashdot write-up and subsequent rush to Wikipedia notwithstanding, all we have here is a brief article in a little-known Australian paper, vaguely referencing an as-yet unpublished study by a group of astronomers who seem (it's hard to say anything without reference to the study itself) to have re-interpreted existing data to support a finding contradictory to the current consensus, probably within a relatively narrow domain. A new consensus may or may not be built as other scientists independently verify or discredit the methodology and findings of the study. Sensationalistic headlines aside, a single new study does not automatically establish or dissolve consensus, nor should it. This is precisely what the process of scientific consensus is about, and why scientists (and others) rightly trust it.
How is this modded "insightful"? Scientific models and methods improve, often building upon earlier models and methods. This isn't an indication of incompetence or malfeasance in the earlier science; it just means that we're getting better at it.
Additionally, the revised estimate of the point of divergence of humans from primates as a result of newly-discovered fossil evidence isn't even remotely relevant to a case in which existing data has been re-interpreted to form a new conclusion.
The NASA source doesn't specify at what radius the thickness is measured, leading me to believe that the "1000 light years" figure references an average, or representative, thickness. According to the summary (although curiously unmentioned in TFA) this new discovery seems to pertain specifically to the Milky Way's thickness at the Galactic core, where it is substantially thicker than at points located further down the arms (as illustrated in this side view).
Are you trying to suggest that the entire GCC/G++ toolchain + Mono + Eclipse (or full-featured IDE of choice) + visual design tools + all libraries and includes installable from your distro's installation media (including KDE/Gnome) weighs in at substantially less than a Visual Studio installation? I'd have a hard time believing that the comparable suite of software under Linux constitutes much less than 50% of the size of VS Pro. That might be nominally smaller, but it still qualifies as big by any reasonable measure.
What "laws" are you talking about that Bush should have (or would have) vetoed? This isn't a case of Congress passing unconstitutional laws, but of the President himself ordering actions in direct controversion of established law and the Constitution. How can you not blame one party? Does Bush have some secret party affiliations I'm not aware of?
No, the NYT got it right. You need to stop skimming TFA and assuming you know what it's talking about based on a few words you happen to recognize.
From said article:
"The new discovery was made by a different technique that favors planets more distant from their star. It is based on a trick of Einsteinian gravity called microlensing. If, in the ceaseless shifting of the stars, two stars should become perfectly aligned with the Earth, the gravity of the nearer star can bend and magnify the light from the more distant one, causing it to suddenly get much brighter for a few days.
If the alignment is especially perfect, any big planets attending the nearer star will get into the act, adding their own little bumps to the more distant starlight."
Emphasis added.
In other words, the "lensing effect" of the nearer star doesn't behave, as you clearly imagine, like a cosmic telescope lens to make the distant star system more clearly visible to viewers on earth. Rather, its presence (and the presence of its attendant planets) is betrayed by the distortions they gravity introduces in the transmitted light as they pass between us and the more distant star.
Slashdot Mirror
...learn the difference between 'gleaned' and 'gleamed'.
"Liberal"? Fuck off, troll.
Hm — I'm guessing you opted to take Marketing 101 instead of Programming 101.
I'm responsible for maintenance and development of the online banking software for a mid-sized credit union. I'm currently in the midst of a project to integrate BioPassword's implementation of this technology as a second authentication factor in our online banking product, and while I initially had some skepticism of their claims, I can assure you that the technique is actually surprisingly effective, even for relatively inconsistent typists like myself.
Don't just take my word for it, though — BioPassword has an online demo that offers a good explanation of the technology, and a chance to try it out yourself: http://stage1.biopassword.com/democlient/
Okay, I take it back: you can do basic math.
But even leaving aside questions of whether there are better ways to get slimmed-down Windows installs deployed to a large number of machines with minimal manual intervention (there are) your assumptions are still questionable. For one thing, there's a pretty good likelihood that any corporate IT department deploying Windows laptops in the first place will want the features of the business edition. So let's remove that from the cost of this "upgrade". Now we're down to $50. According to TFS, you can recoup another $25 of the cost with a few configuration options, so now we're down to as little as $25. (For an option that should be, and now is, free — but we'll leave that aside for the sake of discussion.) Using your math and your assumptions about parallelization, for n=10, you've saved about $150.
But what you're really failing to take into consideration, here, is the opportunity cost for this excercise in tedium. Presumably your highly-skilled IT staff are paid $50/hr to do something more useful and productive than mashing buttons — but for the last couple of hours, they haven't been doing it. That means you've effectively lost most of the salary you paid them for those hours, mitigated at best slightly by the benefit you gain from crapware-free laptops. At the end of the day, you've maybe broken even on this undertaking, and your IT guy has wasted hours of his life uninstalling Windows software. Under this scenario, are you sure you weren't better off just paying Sony their extortion fee?
Either your "IT guys" aren't getting paid enough, or you can't do basic math. Or you have a very different definition of "a large volume" than most IT shops do.
"Hardcore torrents"? Probably a pee fetish site.
...Wait, who thought "women's liberation" (what's with the outdated terminology?) constituted dressing eight year olds in hotpants? Are you seriously claiming this practice is the result of feminism, and if so, can you tell me what the hell they're putting in the drinking water over there in Melbourne? Clearly you guys get better drugs than we do here in California.
That's not how you spell 'IQ'.
Again, as noted further on in this thread: you might want to raise that complaint with Microformats.org in general, and David Janes in particular. Janes invented the hAtom microformat, around which WebSlices is based.
To be honest, though, I don't see how hAtom muddies the feed-standard waters any more than they were previously. It's intended to address a different problem space than RSS and Atom, so it's not really competing with either. The RSS/Atom issue, by contrast, arose from the introduction of competing standards to address the very same problem.
A more interesting issue is raised by Janes himself in the blog post linked above, namely Microsoft's decision to implement only a subset of hAtom as WebSlices, with their own top-level element to distinguish WebSlices from general hAtom feeds. I hope he makes his suggestions known to Microsoft, on this count, and I hope they listen.
Take it up with the Microformats folks. WebSlices are just an extension (and a fairly minor one) of the hAtom microformat. Most of your objections to WebSlices could be applied to microformats in general, or to any framework (jQuery, for instance) that uses class attributes for non-CSS semantic purposes.
About the only difference I see here is that the browser itself knows to take advantage of a microformat, and hopefully it's smart enough not to generate false positives from CSS classes with the same name. I can quickly think of a couple of easy ways to make that determination: namely, 1) look for the other required elements of the microformat ("entry-title", "entry-content", etc.), and 2) look for a CSS definition matching the class name. If the the other required elements don't exist in the correct relationship to the matched class, and a CSS rule with the same name exists, it probably wasn't intended as a WebSlice. That seems simple enough, and reasonably bulletproof — and if I could come up with it that easily, I wouldn't be surprised if someone on the IE8 team did as well.
I see we've returned, at long last, to "News for Nerds."
What you call "worn out", I call "tacit acceptance". The day the Bush administration steps down from office is the day commentary, satirical or otherwise, on their actions and policies will become effectively moot — and not a day sooner. Should their actions really go unchallenged for the next ten months because everyone knows they're "douchebags", and is tired of hearing about it?
That something like the pathetic little chubby you get every time you attack someone on the internet from the safety of your anonymity, Mr. AC? I'm guessing you know more than a little of what you speak, and I don't mean Global Warming.
You have no evidence of such an occurrence in this case, and I'd challenge you to find conclusive and credible evidence of such a phenomenon in any other scientific consensus.
Boldly-worded Slashdot write-up and subsequent rush to Wikipedia notwithstanding, all we have here is a brief article in a little-known Australian paper, vaguely referencing an as-yet unpublished study by a group of astronomers who seem (it's hard to say anything without reference to the study itself) to have re-interpreted existing data to support a finding contradictory to the current consensus, probably within a relatively narrow domain. A new consensus may or may not be built as other scientists independently verify or discredit the methodology and findings of the study. Sensationalistic headlines aside, a single new study does not automatically establish or dissolve consensus, nor should it. This is precisely what the process of scientific consensus is about, and why scientists (and others) rightly trust it.
How is this modded "insightful"? Scientific models and methods improve, often building upon earlier models and methods. This isn't an indication of incompetence or malfeasance in the earlier science; it just means that we're getting better at it.
Additionally, the revised estimate of the point of divergence of humans from primates as a result of newly-discovered fossil evidence isn't even remotely relevant to a case in which existing data has been re-interpreted to form a new conclusion.
The NASA source doesn't specify at what radius the thickness is measured, leading me to believe that the "1000 light years" figure references an average, or representative, thickness. According to the summary (although curiously unmentioned in TFA) this new discovery seems to pertain specifically to the Milky Way's thickness at the Galactic core, where it is substantially thicker than at points located further down the arms (as illustrated in this side view).
Are you trying to suggest that the entire GCC/G++ toolchain + Mono + Eclipse (or full-featured IDE of choice) + visual design tools + all libraries and includes installable from your distro's installation media (including KDE/Gnome) weighs in at substantially less than a Visual Studio installation? I'd have a hard time believing that the comparable suite of software under Linux constitutes much less than 50% of the size of VS Pro. That might be nominally smaller, but it still qualifies as big by any reasonable measure.
What "laws" are you talking about that Bush should have (or would have) vetoed? This isn't a case of Congress passing unconstitutional laws, but of the President himself ordering actions in direct controversion of established law and the Constitution. How can you not blame one party? Does Bush have some secret party affiliations I'm not aware of?
:s/they g/their g/
From said article: Emphasis added.
In other words, the "lensing effect" of the nearer star doesn't behave, as you clearly imagine, like a cosmic telescope lens to make the distant star system more clearly visible to viewers on earth. Rather, its presence (and the presence of its attendant planets) is betrayed by the distortions they gravity introduces in the transmitted light as they pass between us and the more distant star.