What is going to happen when the management retires and there are no qualified people to manage the outsourcing of work because it has been outsourced so long?
That is the most ass stupid argument I've read on slashdot in a long time. And slashdot's loaded with ass stupid comments.
You're saying that because a company has been doing a particular thing for so long, when someone in managment retires, the company will fold because nobody knows how to do the same thing they've been doing for 20 years?
The Japanese seem to know how to invest their money for the long term.
The japanese economy has been in recession for something like 10 years now.
you sound knowledgable about the amd processors... I was talking with someone today that asked me what the difference was between the opterons and the athlon 64. I didn't know, my guess was it was a similar situation to the p4-xeons and regular p4s. Is that close, or am I way off base here?
The Athlon64 actually offers great price/performance in plain old 32-bit mode. It gets even better in 64-bit mode
Most of us have seen the benchmarks showing the athlon 64 running very nicely in 32bit mode, but didn't we just have an article posted on slashdot saying 64 bit binaries are usually slower than the 32 bit counterpart?
The first thing I thought of was a stereoscopic display. I have to think that the long term affects of crossing your eyes or whatever to get the 3d effect wouldn't be good for you, but I'd still play around with it.
If they chose the perspective so you did the opposite of crossing your eyes to merge the images, it probably wouldn't be so bad... I've got one of those old stereoscopic posters with made with the random noise pattern. I've looked at it for a long periods in the past, and I did notice that it was a little difficult to focus normally for a few minutes after.
I do, however, understand the desire to have multiple game windows at the same time...but that doesn't hit the cool factor as hard as 3d imaging, at least with me.
I have dual displays at work, and I would hate to be forced to go back to one monitor, but I don't really see that usefulness translating to handheld games. On something like starwars galaxies, with all the various sub-windows it'd be nice though, but not in a handheld.
When the manufacturer reports MTBF, I suspect they're talking about where the mean point is on this curve (i.e. at what point in time have 50% of the drives failed). I don't work in the storage industry, so this is just an educated guess. Someone will probably correct me on this.
MTBF is a statistic on an aggregate. It works like this, you take a whole bunch of hard drives and turn them on. The MTBF is the average cummulative operationing hours of all the drives before the first drive failure.
so with an MTBF of 500,000 you could expect to run 60 drives for about a year before one failed, on average.
But this usually doesn't account for non ideal conditions--such as jarring during shipment, temperature, and other environmentals.
However MTBF loses meaning when the aggregate is reduced in size. So it doesn't mean that on average a single drive will last 500,000 hours.
I'm glad I'm not the only one here on the dot that thinks kill bill was a crap flick.
I think even with all its weirdness there were really just three things that ruined it for me. The dialog, and the lack of editing, and the silly pressurized bleeding. and the dramatic pauses every 2 seconds. so I guess that was four things.
If I heard uma say "wiggle your big toe" one more time, I think I might have killed someone.
Solar cells are inefficient. Only a small amount of the sun's energy is converted to electricity. The rest is waste heat adsorbed by the panels
The inefficiency of solar cells is a bogus argument. The fact is, from a solar point of view, we're at zero percent right now. So anything > 0 is an improvement.
If every rooftop in america had some solar cells on it, and a way to feed the grid, we'd be set. Yes, yes, it would require maintenance, but it wouldn't be all that bad.
say you can get about 10 watts out of a square foot of solar cells (you can do this today, for about $60 per square foot).
now let's say on the average you'll get 1000 watts per roof. I don't know how many houses there are in america, and condos and apartment building work against this idea, but let's say there are 30 million useful roofs, and 8 hours of useful sunshine per day.
That gives 240,000 megawatt-hours per day. The power capacity of florida's plants is about 19,000 megawatts.
Re:Interesting Statistic
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Where do you want to dump the highly toxic chemicals that would be the result of the 200 square mile solar installation?
On the roofs of buildings. Along side roadways. On the Moon.
Also remember that the bigger you make something, the more difficult is to maintain.
That's why you have a distributed system. A snow storm in new york city doesn't cause a traffic jam in seattle.
And together they certainly have the clout to make region codes go away.
What do you suppose they can do? I'm guessing their dvd rental is a big enough portion of blockbuster's revenue that they wouldn't threaten to stop carrying dvds....
"The whole thing revolved around story, not combat"
Three words: Read a book.
Yes, amazing as it may seem, books in general are based on story not combat. The only problem is that if your hardware isn't good enough to enjoy a particular book, your pretty much sh|t out of luck.
Why not offer something for $20/month that lets you download all the music you want?
Maybe if you read TFA, you'd notice that there have been a bunch of companies offering subscription services, and they've all failed.
Personally I have no problem paying a buck per song (or $10 per album, fyi). It works for me. I don't have an mp3 player, so I don't give a crap about their m4p format. It let's me burn to a cd for the car...
Most albums I've considered only had a couple songs I liked... so I'd be paying $xx (whatever CDs cost now, I have no idea) for two songs. with itunes I can get those two songs for $2. I'm happy.
Re:I think my form of encryption is better
on
RSA-576 Factored
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't matter if the other side knows exactly how the encryption works; it doesn't matter if they know everything you know about the message; if they don't have the key, you can mathematically prove that you'll be long dead before they can break it
RSA is not mathematically proven to take a long time to hack in general. The only thing we know about it is right now we don't have a fast way cracking it. There is no proof (mathematical or otherwise) that says we won't discover something tomorrow that renders RSA of any bit length worthless.
I think you will find that when you are slugging it out in the middle of a pack of giants or running for your life from a dragon, or casting fireballs as fast as you possibly can that you really don't have time to be fooling around with your inventory or looking at your character sheet
NwN gives you the option to pause the game to select attacks and whatnot right? It's been a while since I played NwN (got distracted halfway through by bf1942), but it's in KOTOR, and very useful.
Re:My personal favorite
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
- one of the three digit sets of your license plate - the first three letters of your mother's maiden name - the numbe of fillings you have
stick em together and you have a seven or eight character password that looks like garbage but still can be remembered by the user.
That is the most cryptographically weak password I've ever heard of. Maybe not the most, but it's even worse than "password" or "sneakers" because people probably think they are doing good.
That's like asking someone to use their birthdate with their initials tacked on. Just because something looks random...
I think most license plates have 6 characters on them? So now I can just watch which car a target drives in. Mother's maiden name? a little social engineering or a spammy e-mail. And good grief, the number of fillings they have? Even if I didn't want to just take a couple pot shots (how many people have more than 10 fillings? 20?), that's not exactly a state secret.
You might do well to read a book or two by Bruce Schneier
"The U.S. may be the superpower at this time, but this doesn't mean they should have such a strong hand in these decisions"
Imagine for a second that you are playing Civilization. You're playing along, kicking ass most of the time, and then suddenly you find out that someone else is coming up with a weapon system that could be used against you with devastating effects.
Would you:
A) Throw your weight around and get a trump card on the system so that you can jam it when you see fit. B) Decide to let them have their weapons system. After all, just because you're doing better than everyone else in the game doesn't give you the right to win!
Sounds like you would pick B.
Oh, and the weapon system happens to have the side effect of helping ambulances find what side of the street an accident is on.
If you don't like it, don't use it... and you don't. So why complain to slashdot about it?
IM is more interactive than e-mail, but not as resource demanding as using a phone. I mean, I can talk to someone on a phone and work if I'm talking about what I'm working on. But if I'm talking to my wife, the keyboard stops.
Now with IM, I can go back and forth quite easily and smoothly. If I am chatting with my wife on IM, the keyboard doesn't have to stop. If I don't reply in a minute or two, people get the idea that I'm busy.
With e-mail, if I don't reply in a minute or two, that doesn't mean squat. The message might be delayed, I might have closed my e-mail client, or any number of things. People don't expect a prompt repsonse from an e-mail.
If you think IM is somehow distracting, how can you handle a telephone ring?
My favorite example of this is Nexium. I saw an advertisement for this product, and the sum total of the information I got from the ad is that it is a little purple pill that I should ask my doctor about. They never bothered to mention what the product is or what it does.
I believe the laws regulating drug advertising state that if you have to describe the side affects of a drug if you mention what the drug is to be used for. So nexium avoids telling you all the bad stuff it does, while at the same time implying their pill solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything...without actually saying that it solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
"(seriously, what the hell is up w/ the smell in disneyland, anyways?)"
If you meant disney world, it was probably florida that smelled odd to you. I've lived here for 6 years and I don't notice anymore. But for the first few months, everything had a moldy smell.
If you really did mean disney land, I have no idea. Didn't smell bad when I was there.
It would be a good choice if the "featured sites" weren't the paid ones. MSN not only shows you the paid listings first, they're intentionally making it difficult to see beyond them. Thats borderline unethical, imo.
I don't feel particularly strong about this, but I'm gonna bite anyway. Did you know that people pay to have ads placed in the yellow pages? Did you know that you can pay more to have your ad placed multiple times. You can even pay to have it placed in sections where it doesn't really make sense.
I suppose one could argue that we all know that money is paid for those ads. But microsoft categorizes their results. They are broken up into sections like "featured sites" and "sponsored sites", etc... and they give definitions for this.
By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.
Computers have no preference for text. They have no preference for graphics. If they could be said to have any sort of preference at all, it would be binary. And that would still be a misleading statement.
His goofy comments about html don't make any sense. HTML is just as artficial a construct as the graphics rendered by the browser engine.
Does this guy think that you can just write some code on a piece of paper and show it to a CPU? The text on your screen is already an abstraction.
Sounds like he has some problem with the fact that even idiots like himself can use a computer without any kind of in depth knowledge.
And all this nonsense about forcing computers to adapt to us. WE MAKE COMPUTERS. They didn't "evolve" of their own volition. I'm surprised this guy isn't complaining about how using a steering wheel doesn't require knowledge of the actual steering mechanism.
I got lucky in LotR:FotR -- even though I didn't buy any concessions, I still had to dash, and got back just in time to watch Gandalf's fight with the Balrog.
How many times do you use the bathroom during a given day?
I know not all of us have the same sized bladder... But I wonder if some of this isn't a result of conditioning. The lights go out, the music starts, and whammo, you've got to pee. Whether your bladder is full or not.
Slashdot Mirror
What is going to happen when the management retires and there are no qualified people to manage the outsourcing of work because it has been outsourced so long?
That is the most ass stupid argument I've read on slashdot in a long time. And slashdot's loaded with ass stupid comments.
You're saying that because a company has been doing a particular thing for so long, when someone in managment retires, the company will fold because nobody knows how to do the same thing they've been doing for 20 years?
The Japanese seem to know how to invest their money for the long term.
The japanese economy has been in recession for something like 10 years now.
you sound knowledgable about the amd processors... I was talking with someone today that asked me what the difference was between the opterons and the athlon 64. I didn't know, my guess was it was a similar situation to the p4-xeons and regular p4s. Is that close, or am I way off base here?
The Athlon64 actually offers great price/performance in plain old 32-bit mode. It gets even better in 64-bit mode
Most of us have seen the benchmarks showing the athlon 64 running very nicely in 32bit mode, but didn't we just have an article posted on slashdot saying 64 bit binaries are usually slower than the 32 bit counterpart?
Redundancy works well if you have "limitless" power. A completely redundant system here would use twice the power
Cold sparing allows redundancy without using much more power than a non-redundant system.
I don't think this guy bought a separate license for winxp. If you go pro, that brings his pvr to $1000.
The first thing I thought of was a stereoscopic display. I have to think that the long term affects of crossing your eyes or whatever to get the 3d effect wouldn't be good for you, but I'd still play around with it.
If they chose the perspective so you did the opposite of crossing your eyes to merge the images, it probably wouldn't be so bad... I've got one of those old stereoscopic posters with made with the random noise pattern. I've looked at it for a long periods in the past, and I did notice that it was a little difficult to focus normally for a few minutes after.
I do, however, understand the desire to have multiple game windows at the same time...but that doesn't hit the cool factor as hard as 3d imaging, at least with me.
I have dual displays at work, and I would hate to be forced to go back to one monitor, but I don't really see that usefulness translating to handheld games. On something like starwars galaxies, with all the various sub-windows it'd be nice though, but not in a handheld.
When the manufacturer reports MTBF, I suspect they're talking about where the mean point is on this curve (i.e. at what point in time have 50% of the drives failed). I don't work in the storage industry, so this is just an educated guess. Someone will probably correct me on this.
MTBF is a statistic on an aggregate. It works like this, you take a whole bunch of hard drives and turn them on. The MTBF is the average cummulative operationing hours of all the drives before the first drive failure.
so with an MTBF of 500,000 you could expect to run 60 drives for about a year before one failed, on average.
But this usually doesn't account for non ideal conditions--such as jarring during shipment, temperature, and other environmentals.
However MTBF loses meaning when the aggregate is reduced in size. So it doesn't mean that on average a single drive will last 500,000 hours.
I'm glad I'm not the only one here on the dot that thinks kill bill was a crap flick.
I think even with all its weirdness there were really just three things that ruined it for me. The dialog, and the lack of editing, and the silly pressurized bleeding. and the dramatic pauses every 2 seconds. so I guess that was four things.
If I heard uma say "wiggle your big toe" one more time, I think I might have killed someone.
I goofed on the first quote above... with that quote my comment doesn't make any sense.
I mean to quote this:
Where are you going to put it that wouldn't make environmentalists, homeowners, or farmers go crazy and is still safe from natural disasters?
and my response being the spiel about roofs and roadways.
Solar cells are inefficient. Only a small amount of the sun's energy is converted to electricity. The rest is waste heat adsorbed by the panels
The inefficiency of solar cells is a bogus argument. The fact is, from a solar point of view, we're at zero percent right now. So anything > 0 is an improvement.
If every rooftop in america had some solar cells on it, and a way to feed the grid, we'd be set. Yes, yes, it would require maintenance, but it wouldn't be all that bad.
say you can get about 10 watts out of a square foot of solar cells (you can do this today, for about $60 per square foot).
now let's say on the average you'll get 1000 watts per roof. I don't know how many houses there are in america, and condos and apartment building work against this idea, but let's say there are 30 million useful roofs, and 8 hours of useful sunshine per day.
That gives 240,000 megawatt-hours per day. The power capacity of florida's plants is about 19,000 megawatts.
Where do you want to dump the highly toxic chemicals that would be the result of the 200 square mile solar installation?
On the roofs of buildings. Along side roadways. On the Moon.
Also remember that the bigger you make something, the more difficult is to maintain.
That's why you have a distributed system. A snow storm in new york city doesn't cause a traffic jam in seattle.
And together they certainly have the clout to make region codes go away.
What do you suppose they can do? I'm guessing their dvd rental is a big enough portion of blockbuster's revenue that they wouldn't threaten to stop carrying dvds....
"The whole thing revolved around story, not combat"
Three words: Read a book.
Yes, amazing as it may seem, books in general are based on story not combat. The only problem is that if your hardware isn't good enough to enjoy a particular book, your pretty much sh|t out of luck.
Why not offer something for $20/month that lets you download all the music you want?
Maybe if you read TFA, you'd notice that there have been a bunch of companies offering subscription services, and they've all failed.
Personally I have no problem paying a buck per song (or $10 per album, fyi). It works for me. I don't have an mp3 player, so I don't give a crap about their m4p format. It let's me burn to a cd for the car...
Most albums I've considered only had a couple songs I liked... so I'd be paying $xx (whatever CDs cost now, I have no idea) for two songs. with itunes I can get those two songs for $2. I'm happy.
It doesn't matter if the other side knows exactly how the encryption works; it doesn't matter if they know everything you know about the message; if they don't have the key, you can mathematically prove that you'll be long dead before they can break it
RSA is not mathematically proven to take a long time to hack in general. The only thing we know about it is right now we don't have a fast way cracking it. There is no proof (mathematical or otherwise) that says we won't discover something tomorrow that renders RSA of any bit length worthless.
I think you will find that when you are slugging it out in the middle of a pack of giants or running for your life from a dragon, or casting fireballs as fast as you possibly can that you really don't have time to be fooling around with your inventory or looking at your character sheet
NwN gives you the option to pause the game to select attacks and whatnot right? It's been a while since I played NwN (got distracted halfway through by bf1942), but it's in KOTOR, and very useful.
- one of the three digit sets of your license plate
- the first three letters of your mother's maiden name
- the numbe of fillings you have
stick em together and you have a seven or eight character password that looks like garbage but still can be remembered by the user.
That is the most cryptographically weak password I've ever heard of. Maybe not the most, but it's even worse than "password" or "sneakers" because people probably think they are doing good.
That's like asking someone to use their birthdate with their initials tacked on. Just because something looks random...
I think most license plates have 6 characters on them? So now I can just watch which car a target drives in. Mother's maiden name? a little social engineering or a spammy e-mail. And good grief, the number of fillings they have? Even if I didn't want to just take a couple pot shots (how many people have more than 10 fillings? 20?), that's not exactly a state secret.
You might do well to read a book or two by Bruce Schneier
"The U.S. may be the superpower at this time, but this doesn't mean they should have such a strong hand in these decisions"
Imagine for a second that you are playing Civilization. You're playing along, kicking ass most of the time, and then suddenly you find out that someone else is coming up with a weapon system that could be used against you with devastating effects.
Would you:
A) Throw your weight around and get a trump card on the system so that you can jam it when you see fit.
B) Decide to let them have their weapons system. After all, just because you're doing better than everyone else in the game doesn't give you the right to win!
Sounds like you would pick B.
Oh, and the weapon system happens to have the side effect of helping ambulances find what side of the street an accident is on.
If you don't like it, don't use it... and you don't. So why complain to slashdot about it?
IM is more interactive than e-mail, but not as resource demanding as using a phone. I mean, I can talk to someone on a phone and work if I'm talking about what I'm working on. But if I'm talking to my wife, the keyboard stops.
Now with IM, I can go back and forth quite easily and smoothly. If I am chatting with my wife on IM, the keyboard doesn't have to stop. If I don't reply in a minute or two, people get the idea that I'm busy.
With e-mail, if I don't reply in a minute or two, that doesn't mean squat. The message might be delayed, I might have closed my e-mail client, or any number of things. People don't expect a prompt repsonse from an e-mail.
If you think IM is somehow distracting, how can you handle a telephone ring?
My favorite example of this is Nexium. I saw an advertisement for this product, and the sum total of the information I got from the ad is that it is a little purple pill that I should ask my doctor about. They never bothered to mention what the product is or what it does.
I believe the laws regulating drug advertising state that if you have to describe the side affects of a drug if you mention what the drug is to be used for. So nexium avoids telling you all the bad stuff it does, while at the same time implying their pill solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything...without actually saying that it solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
"(seriously, what the hell is up w/ the smell in disneyland, anyways?)"
If you meant disney world, it was probably florida that smelled odd to you. I've lived here for 6 years and I don't notice anymore. But for the first few months, everything had a moldy smell.
If you really did mean disney land, I have no idea. Didn't smell bad when I was there.
Any one notice that our 'new' Singleton overlord is the exact same one as the old one?
Now that was funny.
It would be a good choice if the "featured sites" weren't the paid ones. MSN not only shows you the paid listings first, they're intentionally making it difficult to see beyond them. Thats borderline unethical, imo.
I don't feel particularly strong about this, but I'm gonna bite anyway. Did you know that people pay to have ads placed in the yellow pages? Did you know that you can pay more to have your ad placed multiple times. You can even pay to have it placed in sections where it doesn't really make sense.
I suppose one could argue that we all know that money is paid for those ads. But microsoft categorizes their results. They are broken up into sections like "featured sites" and "sponsored sites", etc... and they give definitions for this.
So I don't see anything unethical about that.
This guy is an idiot.
By presenting us with colourful screens and buttons for us to click on, Microsoft encourages us to believe that we can force computers to adapt entirely to our preferences for visual images, without having to adapt ourselves to their preference for text.
Computers have no preference for text. They have no preference for graphics. If they could be said to have any sort of preference at all, it would be binary. And that would still be a misleading statement.
His goofy comments about html don't make any sense. HTML is just as artficial a construct as the graphics rendered by the browser engine.
Does this guy think that you can just write some code on a piece of paper and show it to a CPU? The text on your screen is already an abstraction.
Sounds like he has some problem with the fact that even idiots like himself can use a computer without any kind of in depth knowledge.
And all this nonsense about forcing computers to adapt to us. WE MAKE COMPUTERS. They didn't "evolve" of their own volition. I'm surprised this guy isn't complaining about how using a steering wheel doesn't require knowledge of the actual steering mechanism.
I got lucky in LotR:FotR -- even though I didn't buy any concessions, I still had to dash, and got back just in time to watch Gandalf's fight with the Balrog.
How many times do you use the bathroom during a given day?
I know not all of us have the same sized bladder... But I wonder if some of this isn't a result of conditioning. The lights go out, the music starts, and whammo, you've got to pee. Whether your bladder is full or not.