It would have been nice if he'd given us more information about the form factor he needs to put this into. Since the client isn't paying the electric or cooling bill then I have to assume that it's colocated, so there might be some real rack unit restrictions that prevent this from adequately working well. It also would have been nice to know storage demands too, as there are tradeoffs in front-accessible drive arrays for cooling and airflow purposes. Most of the cases with tons of hot-swap drives in front lack good front ventilation. If he only needs a few drives then that opens him up to a simple 3U or 4U chassis with a mostly open-grille of a front to make airflow a lot less restrictive.
I don't see what's specifically insulting Microsoft with, "Bought a decent mail server?" as a comment... It could be insulting the juggernaut from Redmond, or it could be insulting the hardware. It's a supposition on your part that the OS/daemon is being insulted.
Mind you, I would not be surprised if the software was the target, but that's mainly because I don't think that the service was originally designed for the kind of usage that it's now seeing. We also don't know from the summary what versions of things they're running, they could still be back on Server 2003 or the like...
But the point of it is that this is a social club, and if we're not going to meet up to do whatever activity we decided upon and happen to have a business meeting along with, why are we even a group?
Do you not realize that most of this is simply because you guys are all older people (at least the original members) and are used to communicating this way?
Your argument fails on account of there being only one or two founding members of the group left, and their not being terribly active anymore. The longest-continually-active member joined in about 1980, and he's actually the one who maintains the listserv. I'm in my thirties so I grew up with BBSes and other textual means of communication, and many of the members are computing professionals and are well used to text as a means of communication. Arguably, most of the active members of the club have been in the club less than fifteen years, some less than five, and we still don't use text as our primary means of communication. Yes, most of the original members have moved on, but generally people join and either let their membership lapse at the first time they'd renew, or else they remain members for years and years, even if they don't show up to every meeting.
With texting and social networking sites, who actually emails their friends anymore? Everyone I know only uses email for work. Although I'd assume that the same would apply to those media as well.
With the telephone and spending time with someone face-to-face, who actually uses the computer to communicate with their friends anymore? Everyone I know uses text-based electronic means to avoid talking to their "friends"...
Seriously, I use electronic means to communicate with my real friends for a couple of things- to figure out where/when to see them, and to share things that are of mutual interest. If I don't see them in person or at least engage in an interactive discussion using my voice with them then I have a difficult time referring to them as friends. On a related note, I've been in a fandom-oriented social club for almost 20 years, and we meet in person every other week. We have a mailing list, but it's for, again, deciding things or bringing things to the group's attention that then get discussed at meetings. This club has met every other week since 1975 when it was founded, in large part because meeting face to face helps bind the group together better.
...people from taking pot shots at them, be it with firearms, slingshots, toy rockets, what have you. I suppose that the best way to prevent this from happening is to make them so hideously expensive to insure or operate that no one bothers.
If you can convince all four of the Abrahamic religions to ignore "Be Fruitful and Multiply" line then we'll be okay. That's only a little less than four billion people, so you shouldn't have any trouble there.
I actually agree with having less people. My parents had two children. My wife and I would probably have two children at most. But, unfortunately the entire world as Humans see it seems to be geared toward growth. Growth to sustain retirement. Growth to add more profit. Growth to add more people. Unfortunately no one seems to understand that growth is not infinite with a finite amount of resources. We need a bit of a sustained steady state, but until we run out of natural resources we're not going to get it.
Robots need to move around for full coverage. Prisoners will act completely normal when the robot is near, and go back to doing whatever once it has gone. Robots are louder and more easily avoided than a good guard in tennis shoes.
That probably depends on how many robots are patrolling though. If there are a fairly large number on patrol and if they patrol at somewhat random intervals, that could set prisoners on edge that they will be caught, and it might actually work in a thoughtcrime sense that maybe prisoners won't engage in activities that have high risk and low reward for fear of being caught.
It all depends on how they're implemented. It's most likely to not go so well in this sense.
But, it does mean that a guard doesn't have to patrol to be ambushed by prisoners, and if a robot is ambushed and transmitting video then theoretically it should be obvious to the controller that it's been messed with. If the operator is paying attention. Unfortunately I predict a lot more late-night card games by the guards instead of attentive watching.
I think that the point is that they all require maintenance, but that once started up, the solar and wind don't require mining, transportation of fuel, or environmental cleanup just by operating, while solar and wind just require machinery maintenance.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have levels? Assuming that there's enough bandwidth for city-level, county-level, state-level, and federal law enforcement on a given piece of spectrum in a given area, wouldn't it just make sense for each municipality to have their own that can't be readily listened in on by others, but also be able to switch, with different credentials, to different encryption that could be read by other agencies? Or maybe to have one bit of spectrum and encryption for individual cities and agencies, and one for metro areas?
Heh. I'm no supporter of Herman Cain, but there is some merit in wanting bills to be shorter and plainer in their language. I would support requiring the entire text of a bill to be read out loud either in committee or on the main chamber floor with a quorum present before a vote on it can be called. That might shorten the bills a bit...
First, I didn't say "New Releases", I said "New DVDs".
Best Buy, Walmart, the local supermarket, Fry's Electronics, Costco, all have DVDs for $5, and there are Blu-ray for $10. We bought all three Star Wars prequels on Blu-Ray for something like $30 at Best Buy, bought all eleven seasons of MASH on DVD from Costco for $80, and all eight Harry Potter movies on Blu-Ray for $80.
Those are the prices I'm talking about. If the movie is brand new, of course it'll cost more. There's enough demand to justify the cost remaining higher. But, when they get a little older it's foolish to expect prices to remain high. That's where the music industry is failing compared to the movie industry, since first-sale CDs are still $16.00. It's pathetic when the movie is cheaper than its soundtrack.
...that lots of other jurisdictions around the planet have handed copyright and patent trolls their posteriors when they couldn't show actual proof they owned what they were suing over. SCO with their issues with Novell took the last vestiges of both the memory of the original SCO and of Caldera and ground them into a bloody pulp, and Righthaven recently hasn't done so well either.
I've maintained for a long time that if businesses that supply ideas want to get paid for their ideas, they need to charge the correct amount for them. As much as I dislike the movie industry for their incessant push for longer and longer copyrights, they do make it inexpensive to have movies in the home. New DVDs for $5.00 and new Blu-Ray for $10 are a no-brainer. The music industry still hasn't got it though, charging a lot more for CDs well past their release dates than they're worth. In the case of movies, they're still somewhat difficult to pirate given the size of files and the lossy formats, but the recording industry should have learned that pirating music for a megabyte a minute is a no-brainer for a lot of people, even if the formats are slightly lossy. They're probably still better than recording FM radio at 22KHz broadcast quality...
It's probably more that Oracle doesn't want to support Itanium anymore, but I'm guessing that so long as Itanium is viable they're stuck supporting contracts that they have with HP. HP is in the middle of suing Oracle for their declared end of support for Itanium products. If Intel continues to make Itanium at HP's behest, that might leave Oracle on the spot.
Sucks to be Oracle's contracts department, but that's what happens when one doesn't write in a good escape clause. It probably legally doesn't really matter why Intel is still supporting the Itanium line, because I'd bet that Oracle never saw this one coming, but since Oracle is a third party to Intel and HP's business dealings as far as the contracts between the two, there's probably not a lot more than complaining that they can do.
I finally had a chance to read the article you posted. It looks like they're not being completely stupid about it, as while they're now on probation, they haven't been actually suspended or kicked out of the sorority, and the requirements put upon them to return themselves to good standing seem mostly educational, not punitive. In short, I think that the punishment matches the crime, as described in the article.
Why one paints one's face is very important in this issue- if one is simply ignorant of the history of why blackface is bad, especially in its intentional caricatures of black people to degrade them and to attempt to force them into only certain places in society, then it's a fairly minor matter. If one is aware of what blackface stood for and did and still chooses to engage in it for those reasons then I really don't have a problem with any organization choosing to exclude those who participate in blackface from also participating in that organization. I don't care if the organization is a sorority, fraternity, employer, non-post-secondary-fraternal organization, club, or anything else.
What's sad is the modules that had to be written to collect and sort the SMS data to derive billing information probably were paid for in the first week of their use...
The fence is to protect the products from employees and other staffers already in the building. Only the more trust-worthy employees can get into the cage. The minimum-wage semi-transient workers are kept out. It's a fairly common technique -- most retail stores do something similar. Certain items (typically small, high-value, and popular) are frequent targets of employee theft, and that's where that stuff goes.
That didn't matter at Computer City or CompUSA. A buddy of mine worked at both of those (by virtue of one absorbing the other) and when both stores were closed he was kept on to help close them. One store apparently never had its camera system installed, and they found that out when they took down those fisheye covers in the ceiling to find them devoid of cameras but chock full of empty merchandise packaging, mostly memory and hard disk drive packaging. Literally a couple-hundred-thousand dollars worth of missing merchandise. Based on where the storage for these products was, it looks like employees were opening packages, stuffing the products into their clothes, and then tossing the packaging up above the drop ceiling that was about 7' up, so the packaging went out of sight to anyone coming in to inspect the room. The other store was equally bad, as apparently warehouse staffers who were paid to bring secured merchandise out to customers were bringing more than one of an item out at a time, loading one in the customer's car, then loading the other into their own. This was finally caught on to by a CUSTOMER who saw a worker load a TV into his own car, and asked the store manager about it. Jailtime was the sentence in the latter, but no one was caught in the former.
The only way, in my opinion, to keep this crap from happening is to find a way to only let real managers (ie, not people promoted to manager so that they can be paid a crap salaried wage while working too many hours) have access to the secured merchandise, and to tie their salaries to the sales and inventory results of the secured merchandise. If the store's inventory gets too out-of-whack, the managers get penalized. Technically they could let non-managers in to these spaces, but if their salaries are based on such numbers they'd be much less inclined to let anyone whose salary isn't based on those numbers in to the area.
I worked at a fairly laid-back place once, and I've seen my current employer go through bouts of relaxed rules versus stringent rules. The former place went out of business though, and the current place can't go out of business because of what its purpose is and how it's funded.
I'm okay with even fairly stringent dresscodes as long as the people I'm working with are good, capable, competent people. So often I work with so many idiots though that it's hard to care to dress to impress when they don't impress me regardless of how they dress.
The inherent problems with the laffer curve are that first, one can not tell where one is in relation to the peak, and second, there's no defined measure of a desire to perform for money versus the taxation on that money in this country. We don't know where were are on the curve, and we [b]don't even know where the curve itself is[/b]. Sure, if you can fix those then the tool is a great one, but right now it's just a loose concept.
My high school macro-econ teacher was about as conservative as they come, to the point of helping run schoolboard members' election campaigns. But, he even said that the laffer curve is useless because there's no way to figure out where one is on it.
So is there an alternative?
on
Of Mice and Cancer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Last time I checked, most people don't want to be lab subjects even when there's not a whole lot of risk, and a lot of modern research means the destruction of the lifeform being tested upon, either by the disease process or by the technicians and scientists studying the progression of the disease or the treatments.
We don't allow for experimentation on prisoners generally, regardless of the possibility of consent, and that really only leaves us with the down-and-out or the insane, and even with the latter, we don't generally allow it if they're diagnosed insane as they no longer can consent either.
Most higher order or larger animals that might make better analogs to humans have gestation periods that are too long, or they're endangered or threatened, or they're more difficult to work with.
I don't see a better solution, though if one is brought to our attention I certainly won't blanket-disapprove without giving it consideration...
Was interoperability a real goal of the complete standards set though?
I can see for some antitampering features for support files for software user interfaces, using a quasi-standard format that makes development less expensive but makes it harder for users to screw up would actually be a good thing in some situations.
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It would have been nice if he'd given us more information about the form factor he needs to put this into. Since the client isn't paying the electric or cooling bill then I have to assume that it's colocated, so there might be some real rack unit restrictions that prevent this from adequately working well. It also would have been nice to know storage demands too, as there are tradeoffs in front-accessible drive arrays for cooling and airflow purposes. Most of the cases with tons of hot-swap drives in front lack good front ventilation. If he only needs a few drives then that opens him up to a simple 3U or 4U chassis with a mostly open-grille of a front to make airflow a lot less restrictive.
I don't see what's specifically insulting Microsoft with, "Bought a decent mail server?" as a comment... It could be insulting the juggernaut from Redmond, or it could be insulting the hardware. It's a supposition on your part that the OS/daemon is being insulted.
Mind you, I would not be surprised if the software was the target, but that's mainly because I don't think that the service was originally designed for the kind of usage that it's now seeing. We also don't know from the summary what versions of things they're running, they could still be back on Server 2003 or the like...
But the point of it is that this is a social club, and if we're not going to meet up to do whatever activity we decided upon and happen to have a business meeting along with, why are we even a group?
Your argument fails on account of there being only one or two founding members of the group left, and their not being terribly active anymore. The longest-continually-active member joined in about 1980, and he's actually the one who maintains the listserv. I'm in my thirties so I grew up with BBSes and other textual means of communication, and many of the members are computing professionals and are well used to text as a means of communication. Arguably, most of the active members of the club have been in the club less than fifteen years, some less than five, and we still don't use text as our primary means of communication. Yes, most of the original members have moved on, but generally people join and either let their membership lapse at the first time they'd renew, or else they remain members for years and years, even if they don't show up to every meeting.
With the telephone and spending time with someone face-to-face, who actually uses the computer to communicate with their friends anymore? Everyone I know uses text-based electronic means to avoid talking to their "friends"...
Seriously, I use electronic means to communicate with my real friends for a couple of things- to figure out where/when to see them, and to share things that are of mutual interest. If I don't see them in person or at least engage in an interactive discussion using my voice with them then I have a difficult time referring to them as friends. On a related note, I've been in a fandom-oriented social club for almost 20 years, and we meet in person every other week. We have a mailing list, but it's for, again, deciding things or bringing things to the group's attention that then get discussed at meetings. This club has met every other week since 1975 when it was founded, in large part because meeting face to face helps bind the group together better.
...people from taking pot shots at them, be it with firearms, slingshots, toy rockets, what have you. I suppose that the best way to prevent this from happening is to make them so hideously expensive to insure or operate that no one bothers.
If you can convince all four of the Abrahamic religions to ignore "Be Fruitful and Multiply" line then we'll be okay. That's only a little less than four billion people, so you shouldn't have any trouble there.
I actually agree with having less people. My parents had two children. My wife and I would probably have two children at most. But, unfortunately the entire world as Humans see it seems to be geared toward growth. Growth to sustain retirement. Growth to add more profit. Growth to add more people. Unfortunately no one seems to understand that growth is not infinite with a finite amount of resources. We need a bit of a sustained steady state, but until we run out of natural resources we're not going to get it.
That probably depends on how many robots are patrolling though. If there are a fairly large number on patrol and if they patrol at somewhat random intervals, that could set prisoners on edge that they will be caught, and it might actually work in a thoughtcrime sense that maybe prisoners won't engage in activities that have high risk and low reward for fear of being caught.
It all depends on how they're implemented. It's most likely to not go so well in this sense.
But, it does mean that a guard doesn't have to patrol to be ambushed by prisoners, and if a robot is ambushed and transmitting video then theoretically it should be obvious to the controller that it's been messed with. If the operator is paying attention. Unfortunately I predict a lot more late-night card games by the guards instead of attentive watching.
It's also much easier to verify that the filter/catalyzer is actually working when there aren't hundreds of millions of them to monitor.
I think that the point is that they all require maintenance, but that once started up, the solar and wind don't require mining, transportation of fuel, or environmental cleanup just by operating, while solar and wind just require machinery maintenance.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have levels? Assuming that there's enough bandwidth for city-level, county-level, state-level, and federal law enforcement on a given piece of spectrum in a given area, wouldn't it just make sense for each municipality to have their own that can't be readily listened in on by others, but also be able to switch, with different credentials, to different encryption that could be read by other agencies? Or maybe to have one bit of spectrum and encryption for individual cities and agencies, and one for metro areas?
Heh. I'm no supporter of Herman Cain, but there is some merit in wanting bills to be shorter and plainer in their language. I would support requiring the entire text of a bill to be read out loud either in committee or on the main chamber floor with a quorum present before a vote on it can be called. That might shorten the bills a bit...
I can't afford a Bang and Olufsen setup, can you?
First, I didn't say "New Releases", I said "New DVDs".
Best Buy, Walmart, the local supermarket, Fry's Electronics, Costco, all have DVDs for $5, and there are Blu-ray for $10. We bought all three Star Wars prequels on Blu-Ray for something like $30 at Best Buy, bought all eleven seasons of MASH on DVD from Costco for $80, and all eight Harry Potter movies on Blu-Ray for $80.
Those are the prices I'm talking about. If the movie is brand new, of course it'll cost more. There's enough demand to justify the cost remaining higher. But, when they get a little older it's foolish to expect prices to remain high. That's where the music industry is failing compared to the movie industry, since first-sale CDs are still $16.00. It's pathetic when the movie is cheaper than its soundtrack.
...that lots of other jurisdictions around the planet have handed copyright and patent trolls their posteriors when they couldn't show actual proof they owned what they were suing over. SCO with their issues with Novell took the last vestiges of both the memory of the original SCO and of Caldera and ground them into a bloody pulp, and Righthaven recently hasn't done so well either.
I've maintained for a long time that if businesses that supply ideas want to get paid for their ideas, they need to charge the correct amount for them. As much as I dislike the movie industry for their incessant push for longer and longer copyrights, they do make it inexpensive to have movies in the home. New DVDs for $5.00 and new Blu-Ray for $10 are a no-brainer. The music industry still hasn't got it though, charging a lot more for CDs well past their release dates than they're worth. In the case of movies, they're still somewhat difficult to pirate given the size of files and the lossy formats, but the recording industry should have learned that pirating music for a megabyte a minute is a no-brainer for a lot of people, even if the formats are slightly lossy. They're probably still better than recording FM radio at 22KHz broadcast quality...
It's probably more that Oracle doesn't want to support Itanium anymore, but I'm guessing that so long as Itanium is viable they're stuck supporting contracts that they have with HP. HP is in the middle of suing Oracle for their declared end of support for Itanium products. If Intel continues to make Itanium at HP's behest, that might leave Oracle on the spot.
Sucks to be Oracle's contracts department, but that's what happens when one doesn't write in a good escape clause. It probably legally doesn't really matter why Intel is still supporting the Itanium line, because I'd bet that Oracle never saw this one coming, but since Oracle is a third party to Intel and HP's business dealings as far as the contracts between the two, there's probably not a lot more than complaining that they can do.
I don't agree. There are always people who will attempt to milk the system even when they're happy. I've had a roommate like that.
I won't dispute that less employees will steal, but it certainly won't eliminate the problem.
I finally had a chance to read the article you posted. It looks like they're not being completely stupid about it, as while they're now on probation, they haven't been actually suspended or kicked out of the sorority, and the requirements put upon them to return themselves to good standing seem mostly educational, not punitive. In short, I think that the punishment matches the crime, as described in the article.
Why one paints one's face is very important in this issue- if one is simply ignorant of the history of why blackface is bad, especially in its intentional caricatures of black people to degrade them and to attempt to force them into only certain places in society, then it's a fairly minor matter. If one is aware of what blackface stood for and did and still chooses to engage in it for those reasons then I really don't have a problem with any organization choosing to exclude those who participate in blackface from also participating in that organization. I don't care if the organization is a sorority, fraternity, employer, non-post-secondary-fraternal organization, club, or anything else.
Heh...
What's sad is the modules that had to be written to collect and sort the SMS data to derive billing information probably were paid for in the first week of their use...
That didn't matter at Computer City or CompUSA. A buddy of mine worked at both of those (by virtue of one absorbing the other) and when both stores were closed he was kept on to help close them. One store apparently never had its camera system installed, and they found that out when they took down those fisheye covers in the ceiling to find them devoid of cameras but chock full of empty merchandise packaging, mostly memory and hard disk drive packaging. Literally a couple-hundred-thousand dollars worth of missing merchandise. Based on where the storage for these products was, it looks like employees were opening packages, stuffing the products into their clothes, and then tossing the packaging up above the drop ceiling that was about 7' up, so the packaging went out of sight to anyone coming in to inspect the room. The other store was equally bad, as apparently warehouse staffers who were paid to bring secured merchandise out to customers were bringing more than one of an item out at a time, loading one in the customer's car, then loading the other into their own. This was finally caught on to by a CUSTOMER who saw a worker load a TV into his own car, and asked the store manager about it. Jailtime was the sentence in the latter, but no one was caught in the former.
The only way, in my opinion, to keep this crap from happening is to find a way to only let real managers (ie, not people promoted to manager so that they can be paid a crap salaried wage while working too many hours) have access to the secured merchandise, and to tie their salaries to the sales and inventory results of the secured merchandise. If the store's inventory gets too out-of-whack, the managers get penalized. Technically they could let non-managers in to these spaces, but if their salaries are based on such numbers they'd be much less inclined to let anyone whose salary isn't based on those numbers in to the area.
*nod*
I worked at a fairly laid-back place once, and I've seen my current employer go through bouts of relaxed rules versus stringent rules. The former place went out of business though, and the current place can't go out of business because of what its purpose is and how it's funded.
I'm okay with even fairly stringent dresscodes as long as the people I'm working with are good, capable, competent people. So often I work with so many idiots though that it's hard to care to dress to impress when they don't impress me regardless of how they dress.
The inherent problems with the laffer curve are that first, one can not tell where one is in relation to the peak, and second, there's no defined measure of a desire to perform for money versus the taxation on that money in this country. We don't know where were are on the curve, and we [b]don't even know where the curve itself is[/b]. Sure, if you can fix those then the tool is a great one, but right now it's just a loose concept.
My high school macro-econ teacher was about as conservative as they come, to the point of helping run schoolboard members' election campaigns. But, he even said that the laffer curve is useless because there's no way to figure out where one is on it.
Last time I checked, most people don't want to be lab subjects even when there's not a whole lot of risk, and a lot of modern research means the destruction of the lifeform being tested upon, either by the disease process or by the technicians and scientists studying the progression of the disease or the treatments.
We don't allow for experimentation on prisoners generally, regardless of the possibility of consent, and that really only leaves us with the down-and-out or the insane, and even with the latter, we don't generally allow it if they're diagnosed insane as they no longer can consent either.
Most higher order or larger animals that might make better analogs to humans have gestation periods that are too long, or they're endangered or threatened, or they're more difficult to work with.
I don't see a better solution, though if one is brought to our attention I certainly won't blanket-disapprove without giving it consideration...
Was interoperability a real goal of the complete standards set though?
I can see for some antitampering features for support files for software user interfaces, using a quasi-standard format that makes development less expensive but makes it harder for users to screw up would actually be a good thing in some situations.
The Free Market is a myth and always has been. Like the Laffer Curve and the trickle-down theory of wealth distribution.