Stupidity is hardly free energy. We all pay for it, none more than the
carriers.
Granted, some days the supply seems endless, but they said that about
the buffalo. What happens when we run out of stupidity?
Think about that, smart guy?
But back in reality land, sometimes things go wrong. People are not always what they appear
to be, and a good employee can sometimes become embittered. Assuming otherwise is naive, and perhaps
a little arrogant. Are you such a good judge of character that you
can pick out the sociopaths from the crowd? Might I suggest you aren't.
And apart from malfeasance, sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes they type "rm -r *"
when they are not in the directory they think they are in.
I'm not suggesting massive security measures, but reasonable steps can go a long way.
Even moderate security is worthwhile and, I think, appreciated by the employees.
P.S.: CD stands for CmdrDaco (apparently). Apologies to CT.
I can't imagine having to be paranoid about employees. That seems to me to be a bigger problem than hardware.
That's kind of a dumb comment. Hasn't CD heard the saying "trust everyone but cut the cards"?
Putting locks on the doors is not paranoia - indeed it prevents paranoia.
Those darn librarians seem to think it's their job to give the great unwashed
public unfettered access to information. It's about time someone reigned these
unabashed libertarians in, and if Congress has to dream up seem dubious theory
that libraries are a major contributor to child predation, well ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Thank god we've got government to keep us straight on these matters.
When an employee asked during a company meeting whether having most
of his (her?) savings in Enron was a
smart thing to do, the management spokewoman could have advised diversification.
Instead she made it clear that Enron was where their
money should be, all the while making a big joke about it.
I accept your point that employees take responsibility for their actions. They should have
no more legal claims than other investors for the fall of Enron stock.
But by encouraging employees to stay undiversified, Enron management
compounded their criminal culpability.
Perhaps not, but she has been entrusted with running it.
She is responsible for the library, and presumably would be held to task
if she shirked that duty.
She's obstructing justice
Nope. Obstructing justice is a specific crime, and this librarian came no where near
to committing such a crime. Quite the opposite - she kept strictly to the law.
When Linux was only a tiny or isolated part of the OS market, it's was to MS's advantage
to do everything they could not to recognize, support, or interoperate with it.
But as Linux reaches a significant size, MS's lack of interoperability becomes a liability.
People start not bothering buying Windows licenses because it doesn't work well with their
favourite OS (e.g., read and write common file formats), despite the fact that Windows
may have functionality they would like to access.
As Windows begins its descent from dominance, it will be forced to start "playing well with others".
This prediction is worth everything you paid for it.
It begs the question - can Los Alamos hang on as a prestigious place or is it too late for the supercomputing powerhouse and weapons lab?"
The traditional, and in my view the proper, meaning of "to beg the question" is "to assume the very thing that's in contention" - that is to say, to use circular logic. It does (or at least did) not mean "to compel one to ask".
I hear even top level news anchors misuse the term. Drives me nuts.
Might I suggest that the measurement errors of an MRI greatly outweigh the errors caused by numerical inaccuracies during the calculation of an FFT, even in single precision.
The company I work for, a seismic processing company, has a few terraflops of processing power provided by clusters of Intel/AMD chips. We do a lot of FFT's, although it's not our major computational roadblock.
We're actually small potatoes. Some large seismic processing centres are on the order of 100 terraflops.
And virtually all of this computation is single precision.
There are enough inaccuracies in transforming to the frequency domain due to the "windowing problem" (which says that the finite length of the input series results in smearing in the frequency domain) that double precision is silly except for very long series.
I'm interested in knowing where and why double precision FFT's are considered necessary.
Similarly, any boss who fires an employee simply on the basis that they have a blog, regardless of content, deserves some sort of dressing down - although this is harder to achieve.
I'm guessing that, in most jurisdications, you can't fire someone simply because they have a blog.
Now if the blogging uses company resources, or if the blog mentions the company,
that's something else.
The U.S. legal system is so screwed up that it's now got me feeling sorry for big, evil corporations, no small feat that. I suspect that soon there will be no course of action that any corporation can take without getting sued for large amounts. In this case we have companies caught between the government and the consumer. Not nice.
60 Minutes had a story about Amgen a few months ago. Amgen were carrying out tests for a treatment for a serious disease. They had to halt the tests when side effects starting showing up - drug companies can not afford to take risks these days once they suspect there are problems.
So the patients sued Amgen - for halting the trials! They said the treatments were working.
60 Minutes thought the story was about how greedy and uncaring drug companies are. I thought the real story was about how it's fast becoming impossible to do business in the United States, even with the best of intentions.
You are absolutely correct. In general, the more patient and methodical you are, the faster the project gets done. It definitely saves money over the life time of the project. This is particularly true for large projects.
It's when you rush and abandon good practises that the project is in danger
of becoming seriously late.
It's something everyone knows, and everyone occasionally forgets.
The profit comes from the fact that it's far cheaper to provide power at a steady
pace than at a highly variable one, even when the total amount of energy produced is the same.
The power companies are in effect saying "you help us achieve a steadier power demand, and
we will share some of the resulting cost savings with you."
And your view of how economies work is a highly distorted one. Free enterprize works principally through mutually beneficial arrangements, not through exploitive ones. Exploitive situations don't tend to last unless encorced at the point of a gun (e.g., through laws) - people in a free society have a habit of just saying "No."
I disagree. The economy has far more win-win situations than win-lose, and this is one of them.
Power companies want to even the power demands so they give price incentives to customers to achieve this. Customers find ways to take advantage to these price incentives. Win-win.
I too question its viability, but if it worked then the power companies would probably make more money. not less.
While their revenues would drop, so too would their costs. It's far cheaper for power companies to accomodate a steady power demand than one with large peaks and troughs, even when the total energy is the same. That's why they implement variable power costs in the first place - to enourage a steady demand.
If this is economical for the customers, why wouldn't it be economical for
the power companies as well? In other words, why doesn't the power company do the power storage
instead of the customers?
And if it's not economical for the power companies to carry out this kind of storage -
taking advantage of far greater economies of scale - how can it be economical for
the individual customer?
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, some days the supply seems endless, but they said that about the buffalo. What happens when we run out of stupidity? Think about that, smart guy?
But back in reality land, sometimes things go wrong. People are not always what they appear to be, and a good employee can sometimes become embittered. Assuming otherwise is naive, and perhaps a little arrogant. Are you such a good judge of character that you can pick out the sociopaths from the crowd? Might I suggest you aren't.
And apart from malfeasance, sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes they type "rm -r *" when they are not in the directory they think they are in.
I'm not suggesting massive security measures, but reasonable steps can go a long way. Even moderate security is worthwhile and, I think, appreciated by the employees.
P.S.: CD stands for CmdrDaco (apparently). Apologies to CT.
Those darn librarians seem to think it's their job to give the great unwashed public unfettered access to information. It's about time someone reigned these unabashed libertarians in, and if Congress has to dream up seem dubious theory that libraries are a major contributor to child predation, well ya gotta do what ya gotta do. Thank god we've got government to keep us straight on these matters.
It was a joke. A joke. The irony of making up a story about people making up stories... Ah, never mind.
When an employee asked during a company meeting whether having most of his (her?) savings in Enron was a smart thing to do, the management spokewoman could have advised diversification. Instead she made it clear that Enron was where their money should be, all the while making a big joke about it.
I accept your point that employees take responsibility for their actions. They should have no more legal claims than other investors for the fall of Enron stock.
But by encouraging employees to stay undiversified, Enron management compounded their criminal culpability.
When Linux was only a tiny or isolated part of the OS market, it's was to MS's advantage to do everything they could not to recognize, support, or interoperate with it.
But as Linux reaches a significant size, MS's lack of interoperability becomes a liability. People start not bothering buying Windows licenses because it doesn't work well with their favourite OS (e.g., read and write common file formats), despite the fact that Windows may have functionality they would like to access.
As Windows begins its descent from dominance, it will be forced to start "playing well with others".
This prediction is worth everything you paid for it.
I hear even top level news anchors misuse the term. Drives me nuts.
Might I suggest that the measurement errors of an MRI greatly outweigh the errors caused by numerical inaccuracies during the calculation of an FFT, even in single precision.
And virtually all of this computation is single precision.
There are enough inaccuracies in transforming to the frequency domain due to the "windowing problem" (which says that the finite length of the input series results in smearing in the frequency domain) that double precision is silly except for very long series.
I'm interested in knowing where and why double precision FFT's are considered necessary.
Looks like you can, in some places, fire someone for blogging at home. Or driving a Ford. Or growing tulips in the backyard. I stand corrected.
Perhaps someone can advise on this.
Here's a link to the story. It's all the information I have.
e s/main828098.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/08/60minut
60 Minutes had a story about Amgen a few months ago. Amgen were carrying out tests for a treatment for a serious disease. They had to halt the tests when side effects starting showing up - drug companies can not afford to take risks these days once they suspect there are problems.
So the patients sued Amgen - for halting the trials! They said the treatments were working.
60 Minutes thought the story was about how greedy and uncaring drug companies are. I thought the real story was about how it's fast becoming impossible to do business in the United States, even with the best of intentions.
The management thinking goes from
to
Unions in the U.S. might well accelerate outsourcing.Well then, we need something to rid us of the cancer-resistant humans.
It's when you rush and abandon good practises that the project is in danger of becoming seriously late.
It's something everyone knows, and everyone occasionally forgets.
These guys are from Calgary. A gram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure. None of these barbaric, obsolete units of measurement for them.
Ah poop, I'm going to get modded offtopic again, aren't I?
The power companies are in effect saying "you help us achieve a steadier power demand, and we will share some of the resulting cost savings with you."
And your view of how economies work is a highly distorted one. Free enterprize works principally through mutually beneficial arrangements, not through exploitive ones. Exploitive situations don't tend to last unless encorced at the point of a gun (e.g., through laws) - people in a free society have a habit of just saying "No."
Power companies want to even the power demands so they give price incentives to customers to achieve this. Customers find ways to take advantage to these price incentives. Win-win.
While their revenues would drop, so too would their costs. It's far cheaper for power companies to accomodate a steady power demand than one with large peaks and troughs, even when the total energy is the same. That's why they implement variable power costs in the first place - to enourage a steady demand.
And if it's not economical for the power companies to carry out this kind of storage - taking advantage of far greater economies of scale - how can it be economical for the individual customer?