That's why you shouldn't have access to prod, but you should be able to either A. get a clone of prod made fairly quickly or B. already have one running so you can mutilate it however you want.
Seriously, hardware is cheap and people are expensive. Minimizing person-time is worth a bit of hardware gluttony.
Sounds like the real answer if for companies to get rid of egomaniac assholes in CxO positions before they are in a position to cause trouble.
There, fixed that for you. I bet you anything that my preventative will result in far less IT troubles than yours.
As another poster said, these twisted IT systems generally come about because IT doesn't know if they'll have a job tomorrow and need to have everything done yesterday. Get rid of those pressures, let them do their jobs, and you can let IT go without worrying quite as much.
Even better - imagine what this would do for laptops! No more would you have to toss out your old one because the GPU has some weird proprietary socket for which nobody's ever produced another chip, so even if you upgrade the CPU that'll still be a bottleneck - you just swap out the GPU/CPU package, and you've upgraded.
And since the GPU and CPU are sharing the same physical space, you can use more case area for things like cooling and memory and disk drives and what have you. It'll be awesome.
(yes, I'm assuming that this is the future - after all, isn't a graphics card basically equivalent to a multi-core CPU, except optimized for different operations?)
The absolute worst part here in Southern California is all of this lawn we've got. They use some Norman Rockwell grade grass that looks exactly like what you expect grass to look like, but is a bitchass to maintain. It has to be watered literally every day, and if the Santa Ana winds (dry and hot and fast) blow in unexpectedly, whole swathes of that stuff just go brown overnight and die. They replace it within a week most times, but the waste! Oh my God, the waste! And nobody ever walks on it, so all of that is useless.
What they really should do is plant those gorgeous native grasses everywhere - hillocks of green, literally shining (for some reason parts of it are silver from certain angles), doesn't need much watering (because it's native grass, it's used to how often it rains down here), doesn't die off if the weather changes unexpectedly, and grows in uneven little hills so people won't walk on it as much.
Basically, if companies didn't insist on having Norman Rockwell style lawns, we could use a shitload less water and things would look a lot nicer too.
Technology isn't teh problem, it's stupid people that are the problem. I live in a mountainous area and one time I saw a hiker toss his used bottle of Evian at a goat. A goat! What an idiot! Fortunately, the goat's automated point defense systems blasted him to a greasy smear before he could really piss off the wildlife. No GPS device will tell you to keep away from the goats, let me tell you.
Why would you ever do that when you can send a container ship for pennies per pound? It makes absolutely zero economic sense. Even if you're sending the goods somewhere inland, a container ship + trucks is almost certainly more efficient than airships will ever be.
That's because GTA 4 sucked, not because of Steam. I got it off of Direct 2 Drive (I think), and every single time I started my computer it tried to get me to log in to that bullshit Rockstar Social Club, even though I stopped playing the game weeks ago. I eventually got fed up with it and removed the startup entry with Autoruns, but still - why install that bullshit on my computer?
That's actually something I've been wondering about - we pay the CEOs and other executives of large companies millions of dollars a year, but we don't think it's worthwhile to pay teachers an equivalent amount? (divided by how many more teachers there are, of course) I mean, apparently the reason why we pay executives so much is that if they screw up, the company fails; if teachers screw up, on the other hand, entire generations of the workforce come out apathetic and worthless.
Teachers have a far greater impact on the economy and on the workforce than any number of CEOs, yet their pay doesn't reflect that.
I'm not entirely certain what strawman construction PZ Myers responded to. Ray Kurtzweil said, and yes this is from the article, but presumably he actually said something like this:
Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
And that is complete bullshit. As other people pointed out, this is like saying that the design of an x86 computer down to the motherboard schematics and the equations for quantum interactions between electrons is contained in the Windows source code.
If you read PZ's response, you'd see that even that is not an accurate analogy. What DNA does, in a sense, is contain the information needed to create an automated construction crew - Caterpillars, forklifts, jackhammers, etc. That construction crew then goes out and builds the brain, based on interactions with the rest of the body.
So yes, maybe with a couple million lines of code we could replicate the DNA that codes for your brain. We would then need several billion more lines of code to replicate the processes used to create the brain, many of which we still don't understand at all.
No, I don't think Ray Kurzweil will ever have an artifical cyborg body, nor do I think I will ever have one (and I'm much younger than he is). Maybe in two or three generations, when we've figured out how to do large-scale, brute force factory science efficiently.
'kay. Stop stealing my money by driving on the roads I helped pay for, using the pipes that come to your house, living in a country whose independence I help pay for (and pay way too much for, but that's another deal entirely), using technology I helped research, the education I helped pay for, the health care that raised you - stop using all those resources that society has given you, and maybe then we can talk about not "stealing your money" any more.
Ok, so if your household is running low on cash do you raise your kids allowances and add more chores?
Funny you should say that; I suggest you read this blog post by the same author.
Our household isn't only running low on cash. We are unemployed. It is a time to cut back and spend less, yes, but it's also the time to find a job. That might mean spending money to get to job interviews, cleaning old suits, patching old jackets - all of these things cost money right now, when the budget can least support it, but are beneficial in the long run because they will help us find employment.
And employed people pay a whole lot more taxes (and thus do a whole lot more to help the budget) than unemployed people.
That's funny, because if you look at where federal tax revenue comes from vs where it goes, you'll see that it's primarily the more densely populated areas paying federal taxes, and the rural, less densely populated areas receiving taxes. That particular link is tilted as a red vs blue thing, but it also shows that more densely populated states receive more in federal tax money than less densely populated states.
So if cities are far, far more subsidized, where's that money coming from? It doesn't seem to be from the federal government, and if it comes from the state where does the state get that money? Cities are still the main source of income for state governments, after all.
Face it, rural areas are highly inefficient. Yes, they create the food that the cities need - but in practice, that means a couple of factory farms owned by an agro-megacorp and manned by maybe a thousand people out in the boonies where nobody can smell the manure. The rest of it is just people who drive too much to get to their day job in the city.
Yes, paying a million people to fix up our crumbling infrastructure (or in this case, to build a high-speed railroad) will be expensive. However, all those million people will no longer be unemployed, which means that they will go from being a drain on society to being a benefit to society. This sort of thing would lead to much faster economic recovery than your "everyone stop spending money right now" plan.
You know why this happens? Because the prosecuting attorney isn't paid to be lenient, and the defending attorney isn't paid to get an acquittal. They both benefit most when the defendant just pleads guilty; the prosecution can then campaign next year about how he's "tough on crime" and has sentenced "hundreds of criminals", and the defense can go home early (or spend more time with his other, more winnable cases).
Our current court system is set up so that all the glory and all the benefit comes from successfully prosecuting someone; we don't care any more about defending the innocent, we just want to punish those believed to be guilty.
If ANY religion teaches hate, then it is not real, It's nothing but made up by man, designed only for the control others through shame and coercion.... Disclaimer: I am a Christian, and I utterly despise the fear, uncertainty and doubt that other Christians preach.
How do you reconcile these two statements? Do you think Christianity is not a real religion yet believe in it anyway? I mean, there's plenty of hate in the New Testament, just see what Jesus did to the money lenders in the temple or to that poor fig tree so clearly by your definition it's not real.
Or do you just ignore those parts and only accept the parts you like? Because if you're willing to do that, why are you a Christian? You could be whatever the heck you want with that sort of filter - "Oh, I'm a vegetarian except for the part where you don't eat meat", "Oh I'm a pacifist except for the part where you can't hit people", etc - so why Christian specifically?
I'm kind of curious; after the "Get Perpendicular!" video, how's Toshiba going to top Hitachi in the "silly video explaining your new technology" race?
After reading TFA, I'm almost scared that it'll involve some sort of cartoon magnetic grain orgy.
Well you see the thing is that the reason why they're earning whatever money they get from royalties is because I, as a citizen of the United States of America, have agreed to temporarily relinquish my right to make copies of their work.
After all, freedom of speech is a right explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment; it doesn't really matter if someone else came up with that speech (or print) first, I theoretically have the right to repeat it as much as I want.
So, being the nice person that I am, I relinquish that right. I agree to temporarily let the copy-right for the work reside solely with the author, so they can make a profit off of it in order to recoup the cost of writing the book, plus some extra profit to encourage other people to widely distribute their works.
Then, after they've had enough time to make a reasonable profit if that work was good enough, I expect to get my rights back. I expect to be able to exercise my free speech rights with regards to that work, with no limit.
So basically yeah. Steven King only makes money due to the forbearance of his readers. If we actually cared, we could set the limit to something like "if it makes more than $75k, it's in the public domain" or whatever.
(as a side note, I will never be able to exercise my free speech rights with regards to any work published in my lifetime - life of the author + 75 years guarantees that I'll be dead by the time it goes free)
You know - if this 22 year old soldier had access to those files, wouldn't a shitload of people in Afghanistan have access to those files? And if a shitload of people in Afghanistan had access to those files, wouldn't some of the Taliban's brighter intelligence people try to bribe them for information, using, say, heroin?
I mean, if operational security in Afghanistan was so shitty that this guy managed to get all those documents to Wikileaks, isn't it reasonable to imagine that maybe the Taliban haven't just been sitting there with their thumbs up their asses this whole time, and maybe already have a lot of that data anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
That's why you shouldn't have access to prod, but you should be able to either A. get a clone of prod made fairly quickly or B. already have one running so you can mutilate it however you want.
Seriously, hardware is cheap and people are expensive. Minimizing person-time is worth a bit of hardware gluttony.
... I've got fcamera on my N900, it works even better now that I've overclocked the phone a touch.
It was just a simple apt-get install fcamera away.
There, fixed that for you. I bet you anything that my preventative will result in far less IT troubles than yours.
As another poster said, these twisted IT systems generally come about because IT doesn't know if they'll have a job tomorrow and need to have everything done yesterday. Get rid of those pressures, let them do their jobs, and you can let IT go without worrying quite as much.
Even better - imagine what this would do for laptops! No more would you have to toss out your old one because the GPU has some weird proprietary socket for which nobody's ever produced another chip, so even if you upgrade the CPU that'll still be a bottleneck - you just swap out the GPU/CPU package, and you've upgraded.
And since the GPU and CPU are sharing the same physical space, you can use more case area for things like cooling and memory and disk drives and what have you. It'll be awesome.
(yes, I'm assuming that this is the future - after all, isn't a graphics card basically equivalent to a multi-core CPU, except optimized for different operations?)
The absolute worst part here in Southern California is all of this lawn we've got. They use some Norman Rockwell grade grass that looks exactly like what you expect grass to look like, but is a bitchass to maintain. It has to be watered literally every day, and if the Santa Ana winds (dry and hot and fast) blow in unexpectedly, whole swathes of that stuff just go brown overnight and die. They replace it within a week most times, but the waste! Oh my God, the waste! And nobody ever walks on it, so all of that is useless.
What they really should do is plant those gorgeous native grasses everywhere - hillocks of green, literally shining (for some reason parts of it are silver from certain angles), doesn't need much watering (because it's native grass, it's used to how often it rains down here), doesn't die off if the weather changes unexpectedly, and grows in uneven little hills so people won't walk on it as much.
Basically, if companies didn't insist on having Norman Rockwell style lawns, we could use a shitload less water and things would look a lot nicer too.
Technology isn't teh problem, it's stupid people that are the problem. I live in a mountainous area and one time I saw a hiker toss his used bottle of Evian at a goat. A goat! What an idiot! Fortunately, the goat's automated point defense systems blasted him to a greasy smear before he could really piss off the wildlife. No GPS device will tell you to keep away from the goats, let me tell you.
Why would you ever do that when you can send a container ship for pennies per pound? It makes absolutely zero economic sense. Even if you're sending the goods somewhere inland, a container ship + trucks is almost certainly more efficient than airships will ever be.
Eh? Is the answer to your test to return no response?
What are you talking about? Several of those sites are porn sites.
That's because GTA 4 sucked, not because of Steam. I got it off of Direct 2 Drive (I think), and every single time I started my computer it tried to get me to log in to that bullshit Rockstar Social Club, even though I stopped playing the game weeks ago. I eventually got fed up with it and removed the startup entry with Autoruns, but still - why install that bullshit on my computer?
So no, GTA 4 is bad even without Steam.
Offtopic I know, but what tweaks are these? If there's a single major downside to the phone it's that the user interface is sluggish.
That's actually something I've been wondering about - we pay the CEOs and other executives of large companies millions of dollars a year, but we don't think it's worthwhile to pay teachers an equivalent amount? (divided by how many more teachers there are, of course) I mean, apparently the reason why we pay executives so much is that if they screw up, the company fails; if teachers screw up, on the other hand, entire generations of the workforce come out apathetic and worthless.
Teachers have a far greater impact on the economy and on the workforce than any number of CEOs, yet their pay doesn't reflect that.
It's like being a little bit pregnant.
I'm not entirely certain what strawman construction PZ Myers responded to. Ray Kurtzweil said, and yes this is from the article, but presumably he actually said something like this:
And that is complete bullshit. As other people pointed out, this is like saying that the design of an x86 computer down to the motherboard schematics and the equations for quantum interactions between electrons is contained in the Windows source code.
If you read PZ's response, you'd see that even that is not an accurate analogy. What DNA does, in a sense, is contain the information needed to create an automated construction crew - Caterpillars, forklifts, jackhammers, etc. That construction crew then goes out and builds the brain, based on interactions with the rest of the body.
So yes, maybe with a couple million lines of code we could replicate the DNA that codes for your brain. We would then need several billion more lines of code to replicate the processes used to create the brain, many of which we still don't understand at all.
No, I don't think Ray Kurzweil will ever have an artifical cyborg body, nor do I think I will ever have one (and I'm much younger than he is). Maybe in two or three generations, when we've figured out how to do large-scale, brute force factory science efficiently.
'kay. Stop stealing my money by driving on the roads I helped pay for, using the pipes that come to your house, living in a country whose independence I help pay for (and pay way too much for, but that's another deal entirely), using technology I helped research, the education I helped pay for, the health care that raised you - stop using all those resources that society has given you, and maybe then we can talk about not "stealing your money" any more.
Funny you should say that; I suggest you read this blog post by the same author.
Our household isn't only running low on cash. We are unemployed. It is a time to cut back and spend less, yes, but it's also the time to find a job. That might mean spending money to get to job interviews, cleaning old suits, patching old jackets - all of these things cost money right now, when the budget can least support it, but are beneficial in the long run because they will help us find employment.
And employed people pay a whole lot more taxes (and thus do a whole lot more to help the budget) than unemployed people.
Huh, looks like my link disappeared. This is what it was supposed to be: http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2004/09/red_states_feed.html
When did America go from being the nation of "can" to the nation of "can't"?
That's funny, because if you look at where federal tax revenue comes from vs where it goes, you'll see that it's primarily the more densely populated areas paying federal taxes, and the rural, less densely populated areas receiving taxes. That particular link is tilted as a red vs blue thing, but it also shows that more densely populated states receive more in federal tax money than less densely populated states.
So if cities are far, far more subsidized, where's that money coming from? It doesn't seem to be from the federal government, and if it comes from the state where does the state get that money? Cities are still the main source of income for state governments, after all.
Face it, rural areas are highly inefficient. Yes, they create the food that the cities need - but in practice, that means a couple of factory farms owned by an agro-megacorp and manned by maybe a thousand people out in the boonies where nobody can smell the manure. The rest of it is just people who drive too much to get to their day job in the city.
I suggest you read this: Sewers and Storm Drains.
Yes, paying a million people to fix up our crumbling infrastructure (or in this case, to build a high-speed railroad) will be expensive. However, all those million people will no longer be unemployed, which means that they will go from being a drain on society to being a benefit to society. This sort of thing would lead to much faster economic recovery than your "everyone stop spending money right now" plan.
You know why this happens? Because the prosecuting attorney isn't paid to be lenient, and the defending attorney isn't paid to get an acquittal. They both benefit most when the defendant just pleads guilty; the prosecution can then campaign next year about how he's "tough on crime" and has sentenced "hundreds of criminals", and the defense can go home early (or spend more time with his other, more winnable cases).
Our current court system is set up so that all the glory and all the benefit comes from successfully prosecuting someone; we don't care any more about defending the innocent, we just want to punish those believed to be guilty.
How do you reconcile these two statements? Do you think Christianity is not a real religion yet believe in it anyway? I mean, there's plenty of hate in the New Testament, just see what Jesus did to the money lenders in the temple or to that poor fig tree so clearly by your definition it's not real.
Or do you just ignore those parts and only accept the parts you like? Because if you're willing to do that, why are you a Christian? You could be whatever the heck you want with that sort of filter - "Oh, I'm a vegetarian except for the part where you don't eat meat", "Oh I'm a pacifist except for the part where you can't hit people", etc - so why Christian specifically?
I'm kind of curious; after the "Get Perpendicular!" video, how's Toshiba going to top Hitachi in the "silly video explaining your new technology" race?
After reading TFA, I'm almost scared that it'll involve some sort of cartoon magnetic grain orgy.
Well you see the thing is that the reason why they're earning whatever money they get from royalties is because I, as a citizen of the United States of America, have agreed to temporarily relinquish my right to make copies of their work.
After all, freedom of speech is a right explicitly enumerated in the First Amendment; it doesn't really matter if someone else came up with that speech (or print) first, I theoretically have the right to repeat it as much as I want.
So, being the nice person that I am, I relinquish that right. I agree to temporarily let the copy-right for the work reside solely with the author, so they can make a profit off of it in order to recoup the cost of writing the book, plus some extra profit to encourage other people to widely distribute their works.
Then, after they've had enough time to make a reasonable profit if that work was good enough, I expect to get my rights back. I expect to be able to exercise my free speech rights with regards to that work, with no limit.
So basically yeah. Steven King only makes money due to the forbearance of his readers. If we actually cared, we could set the limit to something like "if it makes more than $75k, it's in the public domain" or whatever.
(as a side note, I will never be able to exercise my free speech rights with regards to any work published in my lifetime - life of the author + 75 years guarantees that I'll be dead by the time it goes free)
You know - if this 22 year old soldier had access to those files, wouldn't a shitload of people in Afghanistan have access to those files? And if a shitload of people in Afghanistan had access to those files, wouldn't some of the Taliban's brighter intelligence people try to bribe them for information, using, say, heroin?
I mean, if operational security in Afghanistan was so shitty that this guy managed to get all those documents to Wikileaks, isn't it reasonable to imagine that maybe the Taliban haven't just been sitting there with their thumbs up their asses this whole time, and maybe already have a lot of that data anyway?