Solution? Ship the drives UNFORMATTED. No partitions or filesystems, no malware.
Most brands ship that brain-dead "install software" anyway, which the clueless will install. Have that "Initialize" the drive for them. The ones smart enough to not install that crap software will be smart enough to format the drive themselves. =Smidge=
Just in case of "idiot": Stars are not that bright and require a longer exposure time. The moon is actually very bright and a short exposure time is required to prevent the image from being washed out. The result is the stars don't appear because the camera has been desensitised to take clear pictures of bright things.
Take a picture of any brightly lit object on a starry night and you'll likely find the stars aren't in the photo. =Smidge=
P.S. Whoever gave the parent an "Insightful" mod was definately an idiot.
Yes, more often than not that budget ceiling is completely unrealistic.
More often than not the budget overruns are the result of at least one of two things (usually both): One: The budget was created by someone trying to "sell" the project, and tried to shrink the number to make it more appealing to the client. Two: The client sat on the project for several years and nearly everything doubled in price (or, if we're talking copper, quadrupled). Usually the two work hand-in-hand as the salesman guy will completely fail to account for continually rising costs of labor, fuel and materials for when construction actually starts half a decade later. God forbid he adds a few percent to those "per-square-foot" numbers he pulls out of a decade old estimating book.
I've been involved in a few projects where they don't even go that far. The client just says "Hey, let's expand our facilities... $25M should be enough, right?" and ask for everything under the sun.
The guys who generate the estimates that sell the project and the guys who actually design the project are practically never the same. The only estimates I've ever seen leave my office were on our own fees. =Smidge=
Um... no. You might want to work in the business a bit before trying to make a joke like that. The total budget ceiling is usually set before the client even solicits design ideas from architects.
Being a commercial MEP engineer, it's tough to decide which post to reply to... but I had the strongest feeligns abotu this one.
Of course, "engineering" is a pretty broad dicipline. There are many specific types of engineers: Civil work mostly with the people and environment - making them the obvious choice for building design since they WILL take into account the "people factor" in their design.
Then there's structural, who will be more concerned that the building will stay standing. I would not designate a structural engineer to design the overall layout since it is outside of their specialty. (Not to say they are incapable, but part of engineering ethic is to not deliberately take on tasks you're not actually aquainted with)
As an MEP (Mechanical/Electrical/Plumbing - or simply Mechanical) engineer, my "specialty" is pipes, ducts and wires. My concern is the physical comfort and utility of the space: Temperature and humidity, lighting, noise (from my equipment), power and data systems, life safety systems. I would not consider myself to actually be qualified to design an entire building, but like other engineers I have an eye for the practical. I frequently find myself fighting with the architects for space to place equipment and rum pipe/conduit, and I DO consider aestetics in that process. I don't want the building to look like crap either...
Fact is, though, than an architect is generally not trained in any of the concerns that engineers are. Nearly every one of the 80-something job I've seen in the past ten years have had some very drain-dead design elements. These are not even radical designs, either... I'd give examples but I don't want to get carried away right now, but the bulk of them involve not accounting for climate, weather, actual use of the space and behavioral patterns, or constructability.
There's a reason why an Engineer can put his seal on an architectural drawing, but an architect can not put his seal on an engineering drawing. =Smidge=
Kids would give their clothes to others to carry for them.
"Gee, these two students have been sticking together all day... and they don't even have all the same classes! Send someone to take a peek."
Honestly, how long does it take for the regular teacher to run down the names of their students to see if they're there.
That'll tell you where they AREN'T. The whole point is to know where they ARE, or at least were. Granted they could take the bugged article of clothing off, but if it's a shirt, pants, shoes or something it would be hard to do and not stand out as obviously not wearing the appropriate uniform.
If there was a fire, do you want to teachers to manually check each kid got out alive or just rely on a tag in a piece of clothing.
Obviously a physical head count is a requirement, but an RFID locater could help in the event the head count comes up short... even if there's a chance the kid ditched the tag somewhere, there's at least an equal chance it's still on him. If the building is on fire and not everyone is accounted for, wouldn't having a general idea where they might be in the building count as a plus? =Smidge=
Neither frequency nor transmission speed are addressable. RAM and other data storage are.
The problem is this: To address things in even quantities of a thousand, you need 10 bits:
11 1110 1000 (binary) = 1000 (decimal)
From a practical computing standpoint, this is a horrible way to do it. You want to maximize your range using as few bits as possible - so if you're using 10 bit addresses you use the full [11 1111 1111 (binary) = 1023 (decimal)] for a total of 1024 addresses.
This became known as a "kilobyte." That's just the way it happened and it made plenty of sense at the time. From that day forth, adding "byte" to the end of an SI prefix automatically implied you were talking in base-2 measurements.
...until the hard drive manufacturers decided to break the pattern and actually use the SI meaning of "kilo" in "kilobyte," most likely as a marketing ploy, but it could also have been a convenience thing.
I propose, instead of trying to get everyone to use a new unit of measure (KiB/MiB/GiB) that hard drive manufacturers start labeling their drives in terms of BITS. This will remove all confusion from both ends: bits are always measured in base 10 by everybody, and it makes the drives sound more impressive (8 terabit!) while still being truthful and practical. Also, a bit will always be a bit - being the quanta of data used in binary computing, you can't break it down any further. A "word" is not always 16 bits, depending on who you talk to, so heaven help us if the definition of "byte = 8 bits" should become obsolete too (Probably won't, but no harm in future-proofing.) =Smidge=
He was expanding on the vote metaphor. You have essentially two "candidates" - Keep and Delete.
The "Write-ins" are alternatives like Merge and Cleanup - which are really other ways of saying "Keep" but do not actually seem to count as "Keep" votes, thus making it seem like there are fewer supporters of the Keep option when it might actually be what the majority wants, if only in spirit.
In other words, "Merge" and "Cleanup" should be counted as "Keep" for the purpose of those votes. If the admin only does a grep for "Keep" and "Delete" then he may be discarding a lot of votes that would otherwise preserve the article... you can't clean up an article that was deleted, after all... =Smidge=
Boron is only slightly more rare than copper, and is commercially available by the ton (though not in pure elemental form)
Tritium is extremely easy to manufacture, but with a half life of ~12 years it's not something you generally store. It's easy to make as you need it though, usually by bombarding Lithium-6 or Boron-10 with neutrons. =Smidge=
My OptOnline upstream got capped at a blazing 17 KB/sec for an entire year when I let sometyhing upload overnight at ~230KB/sec (The full 2.0 mbps offered). I don't know how long that ran, but the next morning an a full year afterwards I couldn't upload anything faster than 17KB/sec... and trying to do so starved other apps to the point where they would time out. I've been careful to manually cap my upload speeds at 80 KB/sec to keep far away from that invisible line and still have room for other stuff.
20M upstream is really, really tempting, but I'll sit back and keep an eye out for complaints. To date I have yet to hear of any FiOS troubles, though. I was already considering getting FiOS (the only thing preventing me was the cutting of the copper stories) and this makes it so tempting it hurts! =Smidge=
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Historically, some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God. While your idea has merit for a very young civilizations, religion as a means of social control became obsolete as soon as secular law was invented. Since then it's only been abused to manipulate and extort people, at least on a scale that has any impact on society as a whole. (Exceptions made for those small groups who actually practice what they preach.)
Evolution is a pretty slow process... I guess 3000 years or so isn't quite long enough to breed out the religious nutjobs. =Smidge=
I think what would really help is some mechanism to ensure a payment is received before you can connect to a BT tracker. Similar to some trackers that require registration, but a step up to ensure you have paid for that particular file. As an incentive to seed, offer some sort of rebate or shop credit for seeding to a certain ratio.
This way, BitTorrent can be used in a more direct and obvious method for legitimate content distribution, the seller saves a some bandwidth and the customer gets what they want when they want it. =Smidge=
Speaking of logical fallacies, are you capable of writing anything other than ad-hominem attacks? I've yet to see it.
Racketeering is the running of an illegal business, in whole or in part. It is illegal to coerce people, whether by death threats or financial/legal threats. It is illegal to coerce other companies, either by physical threat or financial/legal threat. Just because it's not literally life or death doesn't mean it causes any less anxiety and suffering, therefore it is still coercion.
And yes, it is possible for a lawsuit to be, in itself, illegal. Therefore improper use of legal threats can be another form of racketeering. The RIAA is a perfect example and I'm amazed RICO complaints haven't been used more often and with better success.
There are several facets to Microsoft's business practices that are "questionably legal" - and you don't have to be a rabid MS hater to see that. The RICO act allows for these practices to be brought before a court for a closer look. It may not be getting applied to the types of "business" it was originally intended for, but it is certainly being used for the same general purpose.
You have a company that has great power and influence which maintains that power through bullying and corruption rather than by merit of its products and services. Guess what? That's exactly what the mob does!
Now if all you have to say is more insults, just save us all the time and go back under your bridge. =Smidge=
So even if we stick solely with your definition, the only difference in their behavior is the use of violence. If you replace the threat of physical violence with a threat of legal and financial ruin, they are virtually identical.
Use violence to coerce people? Organized crime!
Use lawyers to coerce people? Just shrewd business!
I think you watch too many movies, personally. The coercion part is what makes it "organized crime", not the means and methods. =Smidge=
I'll steer clear of the efficiency claims, but the cost would definitely be a bargain.
All thing else being considered equal, compare a modern turbine: -Mast -At least two (Usually three) airfoil blades (engineered composite materials) -Gearbox (fairly complex device) -Generator head (fairly complex device)
To this thing: -Mast with gap in middle -Length of strong, flexible material (metal, plastic) -Permanent magnet -Coils of wire
That's dead simple and could probably be supplied in kit form and assembled with absolutely minimum tools... like nothing but a large hex wrench. =Smidge=
That's what the FCC is supposed to do. That's what it was created to do: Make sure everybody's toys will play nice with everybody else's toys.
Unfortunately, there are two other functions the FCC performs: One is to effectively act as a national censorship bureau. I fail to see any real need for a federal agency with the power to create AND enforce "decency laws" for public broadcast media.
The other is to act as an overseeing body for companies that deal with the first two functions (EM spectrum and public media). This is another bullshit function IMHO, and in context of this article the most blatantly corrupt seen in the federal government in a long while.
Regulating the radio frequencies is good and useful. We do not need a federal nanny and corporate shill along with it. =Smidge=
Still won't work. It's safe to assume the distortion/noise added to the text to prevent simple OCR would be different for each instance of the image; that's the whole point, after all. Hashes of the image data are useless in that case.
Also, storing the hashes for successfully identified images is also useless... once a word is identified by at least two parties, it is removed from circulation. That means if the attacker IDs a word correctly, chances are it won't stay in the system much longer. Even if the attackers manage to find a way to identify the same word despite the random distortions mentioned above (which would effectively beat *all* CAPTCHA systems anyway) then using that data more than a few times guarantees it will be removed from circulation. =Smidge=
You don't know which word is known (and checked against) and which is unknown. This makes your ORC attack less effective because you must get BOTH words right in order to guarantee success.
Also, if the first two people to decypher the unknown word don't agree, then the word is recycled back into the system until "a lot more people" submit the same answer. This greatly reduces the threat of a "garbage attack" because any random input is unlikely to be repeated by the second person to get that word, or anyone else for that matter.
You didn't even have to RTFA to get that much... =Smidge=
I think what was meant is: There is no "off switch" for the "feature". If you want to disable it, you have to manually track down all the code that enables the functionality and remove it yourself, as opposed to unchecking a box on an adminstration page or editing a line in a config file.
Take that money and buy cheap portable cameras with them. Hand these cameras out for FREE to the public. Along with the cameras, pass out vouchers for Internet access.
Now wait a few days and look around on YouTube/MySpace for the results of your "publicly owned distributed surveillance" system. If there's anything I learned on the Internet about catching criminals, it's that they will invariably videotape themselves committing the crime and post it for the world to see. =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
Solution? Ship the drives UNFORMATTED. No partitions or filesystems, no malware.
Most brands ship that brain-dead "install software" anyway, which the clueless will install. Have that "Initialize" the drive for them. The ones smart enough to not install that crap software will be smart enough to format the drive themselves.
=Smidge=
Idiot or troll? Can't decide.
Just in case of "idiot": Stars are not that bright and require a longer exposure time. The moon is actually very bright and a short exposure time is required to prevent the image from being washed out. The result is the stars don't appear because the camera has been desensitised to take clear pictures of bright things.
Take a picture of any brightly lit object on a starry night and you'll likely find the stars aren't in the photo.
=Smidge=
P.S. Whoever gave the parent an "Insightful" mod was definately an idiot.
Yes, more often than not that budget ceiling is completely unrealistic.
More often than not the budget overruns are the result of at least one of two things (usually both): One: The budget was created by someone trying to "sell" the project, and tried to shrink the number to make it more appealing to the client. Two: The client sat on the project for several years and nearly everything doubled in price (or, if we're talking copper, quadrupled). Usually the two work hand-in-hand as the salesman guy will completely fail to account for continually rising costs of labor, fuel and materials for when construction actually starts half a decade later. God forbid he adds a few percent to those "per-square-foot" numbers he pulls out of a decade old estimating book.
I've been involved in a few projects where they don't even go that far. The client just says "Hey, let's expand our facilities... $25M should be enough, right?" and ask for everything under the sun.
The guys who generate the estimates that sell the project and the guys who actually design the project are practically never the same. The only estimates I've ever seen leave my office were on our own fees.
=Smidge=
Um... no. You might want to work in the business a bit before trying to make a joke like that. The total budget ceiling is usually set before the client even solicits design ideas from architects.
=Smidge=
Being a commercial MEP engineer, it's tough to decide which post to reply to... but I had the strongest feeligns abotu this one.
Of course, "engineering" is a pretty broad dicipline. There are many specific types of engineers: Civil work mostly with the people and environment - making them the obvious choice for building design since they WILL take into account the "people factor" in their design.
Then there's structural, who will be more concerned that the building will stay standing. I would not designate a structural engineer to design the overall layout since it is outside of their specialty. (Not to say they are incapable, but part of engineering ethic is to not deliberately take on tasks you're not actually aquainted with)
As an MEP (Mechanical/Electrical/Plumbing - or simply Mechanical) engineer, my "specialty" is pipes, ducts and wires. My concern is the physical comfort and utility of the space: Temperature and humidity, lighting, noise (from my equipment), power and data systems, life safety systems. I would not consider myself to actually be qualified to design an entire building, but like other engineers I have an eye for the practical. I frequently find myself fighting with the architects for space to place equipment and rum pipe/conduit, and I DO consider aestetics in that process. I don't want the building to look like crap either...
Fact is, though, than an architect is generally not trained in any of the concerns that engineers are. Nearly every one of the 80-something job I've seen in the past ten years have had some very drain-dead design elements. These are not even radical designs, either... I'd give examples but I don't want to get carried away right now, but the bulk of them involve not accounting for climate, weather, actual use of the space and behavioral patterns, or constructability.
There's a reason why an Engineer can put his seal on an architectural drawing, but an architect can not put his seal on an engineering drawing.
=Smidge=
Kids would give their clothes to others to carry for them.
"Gee, these two students have been sticking together all day... and they don't even have all the same classes! Send someone to take a peek."
Honestly, how long does it take for the regular teacher to run down the names of their students to see if they're there.
That'll tell you where they AREN'T. The whole point is to know where they ARE, or at least were. Granted they could take the bugged article of clothing off, but if it's a shirt, pants, shoes or something it would be hard to do and not stand out as obviously not wearing the appropriate uniform.
If there was a fire, do you want to teachers to manually check each kid got out alive or just rely on a tag in a piece of clothing.
Obviously a physical head count is a requirement, but an RFID locater could help in the event the head count comes up short... even if there's a chance the kid ditched the tag somewhere, there's at least an equal chance it's still on him. If the building is on fire and not everyone is accounted for, wouldn't having a general idea where they might be in the building count as a plus?
=Smidge=
Even the Weighted Companion Cube has 16 accounts. What an attention whore! So much for being faithful...
At least he's never threatened to stab me.
=Smidge=
Neither frequency nor transmission speed are addressable. RAM and other data storage are.
...until the hard drive manufacturers decided to break the pattern and actually use the SI meaning of "kilo" in "kilobyte," most likely as a marketing ploy, but it could also have been a convenience thing.
The problem is this: To address things in even quantities of a thousand, you need 10 bits:
11 1110 1000 (binary) = 1000 (decimal)
From a practical computing standpoint, this is a horrible way to do it. You want to maximize your range using as few bits as possible - so if you're using 10 bit addresses you use the full [11 1111 1111 (binary) = 1023 (decimal)] for a total of 1024 addresses.
This became known as a "kilobyte." That's just the way it happened and it made plenty of sense at the time. From that day forth, adding "byte" to the end of an SI prefix automatically implied you were talking in base-2 measurements.
I propose, instead of trying to get everyone to use a new unit of measure (KiB/MiB/GiB) that hard drive manufacturers start labeling their drives in terms of BITS. This will remove all confusion from both ends: bits are always measured in base 10 by everybody, and it makes the drives sound more impressive (8 terabit!) while still being truthful and practical. Also, a bit will always be a bit - being the quanta of data used in binary computing, you can't break it down any further. A "word" is not always 16 bits, depending on who you talk to, so heaven help us if the definition of "byte = 8 bits" should become obsolete too (Probably won't, but no harm in future-proofing.)
=Smidge=
He was expanding on the vote metaphor. You have essentially two "candidates" - Keep and Delete.
The "Write-ins" are alternatives like Merge and Cleanup - which are really other ways of saying "Keep" but do not actually seem to count as "Keep" votes, thus making it seem like there are fewer supporters of the Keep option when it might actually be what the majority wants, if only in spirit.
In other words, "Merge" and "Cleanup" should be counted as "Keep" for the purpose of those votes. If the admin only does a grep for "Keep" and "Delete" then he may be discarding a lot of votes that would otherwise preserve the article... you can't clean up an article that was deleted, after all...
=Smidge=
Boron is only slightly more rare than copper, and is commercially available by the ton (though not in pure elemental form)
Tritium is extremely easy to manufacture, but with a half life of ~12 years it's not something you generally store. It's easy to make as you need it though, usually by bombarding Lithium-6 or Boron-10 with neutrons.
=Smidge=
Anybody have a clue how much it is for Just the Broadband minus the telephone and Subscription TV?
"Internet only" $64.99/mo
https://www22.verizon.com/FiOSForHome/Channels/OrderFiOS/DoublePlay_Landing.aspx
(Be sure to click the "Need more upload speed? View additional plan" link to revean the semi-hidden 20/20 plan!)
=Smidge=
Indeed, this was my first question.
My OptOnline upstream got capped at a blazing 17 KB/sec for an entire year when I let sometyhing upload overnight at ~230KB/sec (The full 2.0 mbps offered). I don't know how long that ran, but the next morning an a full year afterwards I couldn't upload anything faster than 17KB/sec... and trying to do so starved other apps to the point where they would time out. I've been careful to manually cap my upload speeds at 80 KB/sec to keep far away from that invisible line and still have room for other stuff.
20M upstream is really, really tempting, but I'll sit back and keep an eye out for complaints. To date I have yet to hear of any FiOS troubles, though. I was already considering getting FiOS (the only thing preventing me was the cutting of the copper stories) and this makes it so tempting it hurts!
=Smidge=
Looks like someone finally got around to watching Steal This Film.
=Smidge=
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Historically, some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God. While your idea has merit for a very young civilizations, religion as a means of social control became obsolete as soon as secular law was invented. Since then it's only been abused to manipulate and extort people, at least on a scale that has any impact on society as a whole. (Exceptions made for those small groups who actually practice what they preach.)
Evolution is a pretty slow process... I guess 3000 years or so isn't quite long enough to breed out the religious nutjobs.
=Smidge=
I think what would really help is some mechanism to ensure a payment is received before you can connect to a BT tracker. Similar to some trackers that require registration, but a step up to ensure you have paid for that particular file. As an incentive to seed, offer some sort of rebate or shop credit for seeding to a certain ratio.
This way, BitTorrent can be used in a more direct and obvious method for legitimate content distribution, the seller saves a some bandwidth and the customer gets what they want when they want it.
=Smidge=
Speaking of logical fallacies, are you capable of writing anything other than ad-hominem attacks? I've yet to see it.
Racketeering is the running of an illegal business, in whole or in part. It is illegal to coerce people, whether by death threats or financial/legal threats. It is illegal to coerce other companies, either by physical threat or financial/legal threat. Just because it's not literally life or death doesn't mean it causes any less anxiety and suffering, therefore it is still coercion.
And yes, it is possible for a lawsuit to be, in itself, illegal. Therefore improper use of legal threats can be another form of racketeering. The RIAA is a perfect example and I'm amazed RICO complaints haven't been used more often and with better success.
There are several facets to Microsoft's business practices that are "questionably legal" - and you don't have to be a rabid MS hater to see that. The RICO act allows for these practices to be brought before a court for a closer look. It may not be getting applied to the types of "business" it was originally intended for, but it is certainly being used for the same general purpose.
You have a company that has great power and influence which maintains that power through bullying and corruption rather than by merit of its products and services. Guess what? That's exactly what the mob does!
Now if all you have to say is more insults, just save us all the time and go back under your bridge.
=Smidge=
...do you really believe that shit is still as common as it was in the 20's and 30's? Seriously? You ALSO watch too many movies.
And just to get back on track, you might want to look up the definition of "racketeering" before you spout off about abuse of the RICO act.
=Smidge=
So even if we stick solely with your definition, the only difference in their behavior is the use of violence. If you replace the threat of physical violence with a threat of legal and financial ruin, they are virtually identical.
Use violence to coerce people? Organized crime!
Use lawyers to coerce people? Just shrewd business!
I think you watch too many movies, personally. The coercion part is what makes it "organized crime", not the means and methods.
=Smidge=
I'll steer clear of the efficiency claims, but the cost would definitely be a bargain.
All thing else being considered equal, compare a modern turbine:
-Mast
-At least two (Usually three) airfoil blades (engineered composite materials)
-Gearbox (fairly complex device)
-Generator head (fairly complex device)
To this thing:
-Mast with gap in middle
-Length of strong, flexible material (metal, plastic)
-Permanent magnet
-Coils of wire
That's dead simple and could probably be supplied in kit form and assembled with absolutely minimum tools... like nothing but a large hex wrench.
=Smidge=
That's what the FCC is supposed to do. That's what it was created to do: Make sure everybody's toys will play nice with everybody else's toys.
Unfortunately, there are two other functions the FCC performs: One is to effectively act as a national censorship bureau. I fail to see any real need for a federal agency with the power to create AND enforce "decency laws" for public broadcast media.
The other is to act as an overseeing body for companies that deal with the first two functions (EM spectrum and public media). This is another bullshit function IMHO, and in context of this article the most blatantly corrupt seen in the federal government in a long while.
Regulating the radio frequencies is good and useful. We do not need a federal nanny and corporate shill along with it.
=Smidge=
Still won't work. It's safe to assume the distortion/noise added to the text to prevent simple OCR would be different for each instance of the image; that's the whole point, after all. Hashes of the image data are useless in that case.
Also, storing the hashes for successfully identified images is also useless... once a word is identified by at least two parties, it is removed from circulation. That means if the attacker IDs a word correctly, chances are it won't stay in the system much longer. Even if the attackers manage to find a way to identify the same word despite the random distortions mentioned above (which would effectively beat *all* CAPTCHA systems anyway) then using that data more than a few times guarantees it will be removed from circulation.
=Smidge=
You don't know which word is known (and checked against) and which is unknown. This makes your ORC attack less effective because you must get BOTH words right in order to guarantee success.
Also, if the first two people to decypher the unknown word don't agree, then the word is recycled back into the system until "a lot more people" submit the same answer. This greatly reduces the threat of a "garbage attack" because any random input is unlikely to be repeated by the second person to get that word, or anyone else for that matter.
You didn't even have to RTFA to get that much...
=Smidge=
Short answer: Just about everywhere nuclear power is used, except in the United States.
=Smidge=
I think what was meant is: There is no "off switch" for the "feature". If you want to disable it, you have to manually track down all the code that enables the functionality and remove it yourself, as opposed to unchecking a box on an adminstration page or editing a line in a config file.
=Smidge=
Here's an idea!
Take that money and buy cheap portable cameras with them. Hand these cameras out for FREE to the public. Along with the cameras, pass out vouchers for Internet access.
Now wait a few days and look around on YouTube/MySpace for the results of your "publicly owned distributed surveillance" system. If there's anything I learned on the Internet about catching criminals, it's that they will invariably videotape themselves committing the crime and post it for the world to see.
=Smidge=