About 13 years ago, St-Pierre (et Miquelon) was warned of an impending tsunami from some official New York source.
At least it looked official... and it could be a huge disaster for the whole island and its 6,000 or so inhabitants. Local learneds debated about it on radio and TV.
No confirmation with said authorities could be obtained, and Canadian media weren't reporting the story either. What to do? There had been a devastating tsunami in Newfoundland in 1929. Heck, a third of the old women in St-Pierre were refugees from that even; they came to work on the island, only to get married there. (Ok, the Prohibition meant they were also flush with cash, so they could hire maids and take them out to drink...)
But I digress. It seemed like a hoax, but it was plausible. Hundreds of people decided not to take risks, and go to the highest "mountain" (read hill) they could go to and wait.
No wave came. Parents preferred being safe than sorry, and kids played during this grand improvised mass picnic, a festival of sorts.
This was even though the mass of evidence was that this was just a hoax, not even cleverly executed. Based on this, I reckon an exageration about a real event could empty an entire city or village, perhaps even more. No doubt people living close to the hurricane in Florida right now that thought they were sufficiently far away from the "eye" might be convinced to evacuate.
What does a malicious hacker, criminal or terrorist do once people evacuate? Or is fucking with their minds the whole point?
That is pretty damned clueless, though I've seen some frightful stuff in some teams, so I believe some people would do such a thing. Ironically, those that would might be the most likely to protest about garbage collection not letting them control what's going on...:)
Most/.'ers would like to know how we attract more women to computer scientists.
That said, the answer to both questions overlap. I've spoken to a few women that dropped out of CS programs because they felt inadequate in an all-boys club.
Maybe if they felt comfortable with us, they'd actually stay in the program. Oh, and maybe a few of us would get to date them too.
Real live women... that actually like computers (as opposed to only seen via a computer)... you gotta like it.
There are enough MySQL gotchas to drive anyone used to Oracle up the psych ward walls.
Every web developer I know keeps raving about the speed of MySQL... when I show them my database schema, it's usually the first time they've seen a 58 table database. It seems huge and unmanageable if you're used to 1-5 tables, and it most certainly isn't easy without triggers, stored procedures and foreign keys or any of the more complex functions and queries you need when dealing with normalized data.
MySQL really is a great little database for simple read-intensive applications. But it sure as hell feels like a toy to me.
You are right, an ill-timed power outage can cost a lot of money. For an office building, this is better than a UPS- it's a power supply that usually generates power when you actually need it.
You could also add the PR effect of building such a building, and how much easier it can be to get (and keep) tenants, perhaps at slightly higher prices. A 1% difference in occupancy rate can be worth a lot of money.
Also, a hosting company -or anyone with mission-critical applications that require electricity to run- might appreciate the added insurance of in-building power. Not losing a day of work every year due to brown-outs might be worth a little premium too.
This is really dumb sticker shock... payback may be in less than 5 years, not great but not too bad for a very safe investment.
I hear it takes a lot of power to make solar panels
True, a point that is often missed with other forms of energy
and that a panel will almost never generate over its lifetime the power that was put into building it.
FUD. IIRC, you'll start generating positive amounts by year 2-4, depending on location and panels. (Newer planel manufacturing is also much more energy efficient.)
Note that this compares quite well compared to other forms of energy- especially/.'s favorite -nuclear- which takes that long to plan, let alone build or become energy-positive.
For crying out loud, some mathematicians book gets extracted in Wired and that's news?
While Mandelbrot is probably a brilliant mathematician, he could take a lesson or two on social change. If he wants to convince Wall Street to change its ways, merely asking them is not going to work.
Besides, why waste your time telling rich people how they could make more money? If you figure out a way to better predict stock market fluctuations, use it to your own advantage. Wall Street investment firms will then flock to you for advice.
Right now he just sounds like yet another utopian crank.
-HR monkeys that know you can't program in HTML, don't expect you to have a degree or know how to do javascript/html/css/jsp and run a database/app server/do Linux scripting (hire a webdev and a DBA/sysadmin, for crissakes).
-A PHB that know that know what methodology they are using, and is willing to send a poorly written spec document back for fleshing out when it's obvious crap.
-Brownies? Pop? That's cool, but how about some water and healthy snacks while you're at it?
-Vacation time: ok, staying with an employer more than a year is a stretch for me, but if it did happen, how about 4-6 weeks vacation like they have in the civilized world? I'd rather that than an extra 10% salary.
-Oh, and the gimmicks... enough already! If I'm frustrated, I don't need to take it out on your office plush toy. We may be geeks, weird, have allergies to idiotic small talk, but we're not in kindergarden anymore.
Americans will complain about how their ballots have more things on them, how they have more people to elect, etc... What BS.
No one is forcing them to have all the elections at the same time, and I can't imagine it would be really horrible to have to wait 24 hours to know your results. Oh, wait, that wouldn't be such entertainment for the media...
When it stops forcing a refresh to fix the sidebar then I will believe Firefox is "acceptable".
Not at all to detract from your point (I'm still waiting for a couple more improvements before I go installing FF on every computer I can get my hands on) but I thought I would mention that ctrl+/ctrl- "fixes" the layout without a reload necessary.
"The Future Force Warrior will be a responsive and formidable member of an
invincible battle space team" (emphasis mine)
What fools... still trying to be invincible. Read a bit on Golems... here an army is dehumanizing its troops to make them act like robots, even giving them drugs, and then wondering why they don't act predictably.
Ironically, because the US is impregnable on all conventional fronts, anyone attacking only has unconventional means left at their disposals.
There is one weapon that the US is desperately lacking right now, and it's their biggest vulnerability. It doesn't require high-tech expensive weapons... it's called diplomacy. Until it has that, all those toys are going to be worse than useless- they're going to put you at even more risk.
1- True, it won't work every time. The hope is that if more people used this approach, we would indeed have a collective minefield
2- Also true- my hope is that most patent conflicts never reach the courts.
3- Also true- although ours would only be used defensively, so there's a 50% chance the offending company's patents are invalid. If theirs is valid, then we have a 50% chance of being in trouble or having a tie.
4- Absolutely... there is currently no good defense against them, so we'll need to keep challenging those we can and design around those we can't. At least until our stupid laws change.
It's not a perfect solution. But as you seem to indicate, most GPL types might not take issue with such a strategy. Now if a company with a portfolio the size of IBM's were to join in...
That has me wondering: could an open-source outfit start patenting ideas? Could we have GPL-friendly patents?
I know that sounds crazy... but sometimes you have to use a system to make it break, or just defend yourself before it crumbles.
I would consider patenting and licensing to anyone that follows the GPL. If a competitor comes knocking, I have patents to defend myself. Heck, imagine a hundred FL/OSS companies with GPL-patents all counter-attacking any commercial company stupid enough to attack any of its members. It couldn't be done at first for blatant infringement, but more power would allow such an alliance to challenge the very system.
A couple more behaviours that would be interesting would be to license to any commercial company that wanted to use them (again for free) as long as they either don't have patents or make theirs available for free to the GPL-world.
Once the patents are sucessfully filed, the onus would be on to the challenger(s) to prove there is prior art.
So it's easy enough to file a patent, relatively cheap, and half of them have a good strategic and financial payback.
And what's in it for the challenger? It seems everytime a patent needs to be challenged, we're back to a bake sale mentality with small fundraisers. I'd like to see some penalties when people or corporations file frivolous patents, and see them paid to challengers. How's a million dollars sound? More?
Yeah, this is exactly what we want to do to virus writers - give them recognition and a "ranking"...
How long until people start writing viruses just to "get points" on some chart somewhere?
While you have a point, this could be a double-edged sword. Appealing to their irrational desires can force them to take foolish risks.
Does anyone have information on how deep a discount that is?
This is between USD 10.5 and 14 million for 4,000 seats for 4 years, or 656-875/seat/year for "Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and other collaborative Microsoft software products"
I wonder how long it will be until other companies use the same threat... and how long it will take MS shareholders to clue in that their margins are getting squeezed.
If we have AI spidering and parsing of human-readable web pages, there's no reason that data couldn't be augmented with organized data.
One of the keys is going to be the Dreamweaver for the semantic web. He mentions a spreadsheet, but that's not necessarily the only way to think about it.
Say I publish a way of describing a widget- let's pick books. Along with this, I could publish an input form, with the fields nicely formatted and mappings from fields to schema (prolly XForms and XSL, though I haven't looked into those enough to say for sure). Also with this, a function that tries to retrieve the information from the ISBN, or simply the WSDL of a service that does it.
Supposing we don't need a standardized, nuance-free set of mappings, and anyone is free to create schemas, forms and functions or extend someone else's... building a tool to input information is not going to be trivial, but not impossible either.
The important test will be to see if there's even so much as a niche market for this. Should this take off, there might be interesting network effects, and there's no saying exactly what uses people will think up for this.
It was so well known this guy's boss was playing solitaire all the time that people were circulating cartoons about it.
He went to upper management before installing the spyware, and kept bugging them about it.
That to me is not indicative of someone that is simply installing spyware to try and catch his boss surfing porn: it's a sysadmin who's using whatever tools he has to back up a claim no one seems to be taking seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
About 13 years ago, St-Pierre (et Miquelon) was warned of an impending tsunami from some official New York source.
At least it looked official... and it could be a huge disaster for the whole island and its 6,000 or so inhabitants. Local learneds debated about it on radio and TV.
No confirmation with said authorities could be obtained, and Canadian media weren't reporting the story either. What to do? There had been a devastating tsunami in Newfoundland in 1929. Heck, a third of the old women in St-Pierre were refugees from that even; they came to work on the island, only to get married there. (Ok, the Prohibition meant they were also flush with cash, so they could hire maids and take them out to drink...)
But I digress. It seemed like a hoax, but it was plausible. Hundreds of people decided not to take risks, and go to the highest "mountain" (read hill) they could go to and wait.
No wave came. Parents preferred being safe than sorry, and kids played during this grand improvised mass picnic, a festival of sorts.
This was even though the mass of evidence was that this was just a hoax, not even cleverly executed. Based on this, I reckon an exageration about a real event could empty an entire city or village, perhaps even more. No doubt people living close to the hurricane in Florida right now that thought they were sufficiently far away from the "eye" might be convinced to evacuate.
What does a malicious hacker, criminal or terrorist do once people evacuate? Or is fucking with their minds the whole point?
lmao... thanks, that makes sense now!
:)
That is pretty damned clueless, though I've seen some frightful stuff in some teams, so I believe some people would do such a thing. Ironically, those that would might be the most likely to protest about garbage collection not letting them control what's going on...
Hey, not disagreeing with you- just curious: how the heck does a Java programmer manage to leak memory?
(I write server-side java that runs without problems in between release cycles of a few weeks, and I've never actually seen any problems)
Google Zeitgeist is probably your best bet. The main question would be: what the heck is that 5% "other"?
With Mac at 3%, Linux at 1% and "other" at 5%... even accounting for rounding errors, I don't know how people add Windows' market share to 94%.
I sure wish they'd update their Zeitgeist so I can see what happened to IE in July
Most /.'ers would like to know how we attract more women to computer scientists.
That said, the answer to both questions overlap. I've spoken to a few women that dropped out of CS programs because they felt inadequate in an all-boys club.
Maybe if they felt comfortable with us, they'd actually stay in the program. Oh, and maybe a few of us would get to date them too.
Real live women... that actually like computers (as opposed to only seen via a computer)... you gotta like it.
There are enough MySQL gotchas to drive anyone used to Oracle up the psych ward walls.
Every web developer I know keeps raving about the speed of MySQL... when I show them my database schema, it's usually the first time they've seen a 58 table database. It seems huge and unmanageable if you're used to 1-5 tables, and it most certainly isn't easy without triggers, stored procedures and foreign keys or any of the more complex functions and queries you need when dealing with normalized data.
MySQL really is a great little database for simple read-intensive applications. But it sure as hell feels like a toy to me.
You are right, an ill-timed power outage can cost a lot of money. For an office building, this is better than a UPS- it's a power supply that usually generates power when you actually need it.
You could also add the PR effect of building such a building, and how much easier it can be to get (and keep) tenants, perhaps at slightly higher prices. A 1% difference in occupancy rate can be worth a lot of money.
Also, a hosting company -or anyone with mission-critical applications that require electricity to run- might appreciate the added insurance of in-building power. Not losing a day of work every year due to brown-outs might be worth a little premium too.
This is really dumb sticker shock... payback may be in less than 5 years, not great but not too bad for a very safe investment.
FUD. IIRC, you'll start generating positive amounts by year 2-4, depending on location and panels. (Newer planel manufacturing is also much more energy efficient.)
Note that this compares quite well compared to other forms of energy- especially
For crying out loud, some mathematicians book gets extracted in Wired and that's news?
While Mandelbrot is probably a brilliant mathematician, he could take a lesson or two on social change. If he wants to convince Wall Street to change its ways, merely asking them is not going to work.
Besides, why waste your time telling rich people how they could make more money? If you figure out a way to better predict stock market fluctuations, use it to your own advantage. Wall Street investment firms will then flock to you for advice.
Right now he just sounds like yet another utopian crank.
I'm looking for a job right now, so...
-HR monkeys that know you can't program in HTML, don't expect you to have a degree or know how to do javascript/html/css/jsp and run a database/app server/do Linux scripting (hire a webdev and a DBA/sysadmin, for crissakes).
-A PHB that know that know what methodology they are using, and is willing to send a poorly written spec document back for fleshing out when it's obvious crap.
-Brownies? Pop? That's cool, but how about some water and healthy snacks while you're at it?
-Vacation time: ok, staying with an employer more than a year is a stretch for me, but if it did happen, how about 4-6 weeks vacation like they have in the civilized world? I'd rather that than an extra 10% salary.
-Oh, and the gimmicks... enough already! If I'm frustrated, I don't need to take it out on your office plush toy. We may be geeks, weird, have allergies to idiotic small talk, but we're not in kindergarden anymore.
Americans will complain about how their ballots have more things on them, how they have more people to elect, etc... What BS.
No one is forcing them to have all the elections at the same time, and I can't imagine it would be really horrible to have to wait 24 hours to know your results. Oh, wait, that wouldn't be such entertainment for the media...
Never mind then!
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=116870&cid =9888604
Suggested an interesting avenue: register the trademark... my search also returned nothing.
Oh well, I guess these newspapers of record don't like being linked to or read. They just don't get it.
Aarrgh. It would have been much better to point out that Microsoft has at least as many software patents they may be infringing on.
Sigh...
Ironically, because the US is impregnable on all conventional fronts, anyone attacking only has unconventional means left at their disposals.
There is one weapon that the US is desperately lacking right now, and it's their biggest vulnerability. It doesn't require high-tech expensive weapons... it's called diplomacy. Until it has that, all those toys are going to be worse than useless- they're going to put you at even more risk.
Thanks for responding.
1- True, it won't work every time. The hope is that if more people used this approach, we would indeed have a collective minefield
2- Also true- my hope is that most patent conflicts never reach the courts.
3- Also true- although ours would only be used defensively, so there's a 50% chance the offending company's patents are invalid. If theirs is valid, then we have a 50% chance of being in trouble or having a tie.
4- Absolutely... there is currently no good defense against them, so we'll need to keep challenging those we can and design around those we can't. At least until our stupid laws change.
It's not a perfect solution. But as you seem to indicate, most GPL types might not take issue with such a strategy. Now if a company with a portfolio the size of IBM's were to join in...
That has me wondering: could an open-source outfit start patenting ideas? Could we have GPL-friendly patents?
:)
I know that sounds crazy... but sometimes you have to use a system to make it break, or just defend yourself before it crumbles.
I would consider patenting and licensing to anyone that follows the GPL. If a competitor comes knocking, I have patents to defend myself. Heck, imagine a hundred FL/OSS companies with GPL-patents all counter-attacking any commercial company stupid enough to attack any of its members. It couldn't be done at first for blatant infringement, but more power would allow such an alliance to challenge the very system.
A couple more behaviours that would be interesting would be to license to any commercial company that wanted to use them (again for free) as long as they either don't have patents or make theirs available for free to the GPL-world.
Dunno, maybe this is crazy...
And what's in it for the challenger? It seems everytime a patent needs to be challenged, we're back to a bake sale mentality with small fundraisers. I'd like to see some penalties when people or corporations file frivolous patents, and see them paid to challengers. How's a million dollars sound? More?
Novell also has some $600 million in cash, and a better P/E ratio than SUN, so financing this acquisition might not be too difficult.
Does anyone have information on how deep a discount that is?
This is between USD 10.5 and 14 million for 4,000 seats for 4 years, or 656-875/seat/year for "Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and other collaborative Microsoft software products"
I wonder how long it will be until other companies use the same threat... and how long it will take MS shareholders to clue in that their margins are getting squeezed.
If we have AI spidering and parsing of human-readable web pages, there's no reason that data couldn't be augmented with organized data.
One of the keys is going to be the Dreamweaver for the semantic web. He mentions a spreadsheet, but that's not necessarily the only way to think about it.
Say I publish a way of describing a widget- let's pick books. Along with this, I could publish an input form, with the fields nicely formatted and mappings from fields to schema (prolly XForms and XSL, though I haven't looked into those enough to say for sure). Also with this, a function that tries to retrieve the information from the ISBN, or simply the WSDL of a service that does it.
Supposing we don't need a standardized, nuance-free set of mappings, and anyone is free to create schemas, forms and functions or extend someone else's... building a tool to input information is not going to be trivial, but not impossible either.
The important test will be to see if there's even so much as a niche market for this. Should this take off, there might be interesting network effects, and there's no saying exactly what uses people will think up for this.
hold on a sec.
It was so well known this guy's boss was playing solitaire all the time that people were circulating cartoons about it.
He went to upper management before installing the spyware, and kept bugging them about it.
That to me is not indicative of someone that is simply installing spyware to try and catch his boss surfing porn: it's a sysadmin who's using whatever tools he has to back up a claim no one seems to be taking seriously.