"Bank", in this context, describes the type of robber. "Robber" isn't the adjective. If anything, "bank" is the adjective. (There's probably another term that applies better here. I'm not an English major.)
If you really want to split hairs over his grammar, you'd interpret it as saying his contractual obligation is to assassinate, spy on, or steal from a bank robber. The actions of the job itself would need to be supplied contextually (and aren't) and would be done to (or for) a bank robber. Examples:
If your job is bank robbery, sure.
If your job is to be a bank robber, sure.
If your job is working as a bank robber, sure.
To rephrase the issue: the job itself isn't a bank robber. A person accomplishing the job is a bank robber. The sentence as originally structured is nonsensical.
A bad dimmer? Say what? A vast majority of dimmers are very simple pot switches (basically a single resistor). The thing either works or it doesn't.
And he's not the only one having issues with the so-called dimmable CFLs. 5 minutes suggests a bad bulb. 5 days suggests a bad brand. (We can no longer use the dimmer with these CFLs. They just die too quickly.)
And, of course, isn't supported by the 2.4 series kernels that you find in a lot of ARM Linux devices...
Is there a good technical reason for that, or are the systems merely old and the developers lazy? Unless there is a technical reason why 2.4 is being used, it's not the fault of Linux. The fault lies elsewhere.
(disclaimer: I really don't know the answer to the question I asked. If there is a support issue of some kind, you can inform me, but please don't flame.)
I think its a lack of advertisers. They'd probably mix it up if there were more of them.
That may be a contributing factor, but it's no excuse. They have plenty of advertizements, I just have to watch different shows to see them.
Also the only thing they probably have to sell with is the targeting. It's quite possible that Ad Council said ad X should go with show Y.
I really don't know anything about the Ad Council, but targeting is a bad excuse. Let's say I thumb down a commercial. They could search their system for other users who also thumbed that one down, and find an ad that has been ignored or thumbed up. This is a crude system that I've described, but it gets the point across. They could do much, much better targeting, but they're stuck on 1-3 advertisers per show. They're annoying viewers, and not effectively servicing advertizes. They're shooting themselves in the foot.
Five breaks with a single 30 second spot in a 40min program is not nearly as bad as those same five breaks with 20min worth of crap inserted.
Is television really *that* bad where you live?
Yea, it is. Granted, he's rounding down to 40, but that's close enough. Every 40-45 minute episode shown on Hulu airs for a full hour with commercials.
In my country, 5 breaks is what you get when watching a 90 minutes movie, and that's already horribly atmosphere-breaking...
If you identify the climax 1/2 hour in a movie, you'll find that segment runs for a full hour with commercials on broadcast TV. I kid you not. It's absolutely ridiculous.
I'm a little surprised they couldn't make it work with the ad model. But then lots of us know how to block ads on hulu.
It's weird that they leave it one the honor system like that. If one commercial fails to load, it really should try another one. If someone has blocked all ads, they shouldn't be able to download content.
I'm not blaming you (or others). It just baffles me that they haven't taken any steps at all to prevent this. I occasionally get the 30 second black screen with white text. All that means is that somebody's server was annoying me, and got itself blacklisted on my system. (To counter this, they really should run their own DNS server and hand out sub-domains to their advertizing partners. If I block *.ads.hulu.com, I shouldn't be allowed content.)
I wouldn't have a problem with ads if they didn't run the same #(*#$*# ad six times in he space of a 40 minute block.
I hear you. Frankly, I'm surprised that adds are tied so darn closely with the specific show you're watching. This results in seeing the same 2 or 3 adds over and over and over... ad infinitum (pun unintended). If I vote down an ad more than once, I don't want to ever see that ad again. There's no reason to do so. They have plenty of other ads I'd be willing to view instead. (They're just unwilling to show them alongside the show I'm watching right now... but they had no problem show me on the last show I saw. *sigh*)
The problem is figuring out what people will put up with. Some people will be willing to put up with more adds or subscription fees. Some won't
Hulu, as it stands now, is reasonable (though their selection is way too small). If they ever ask for a credit card (paypal, etc), they will instantly lose a huge percentage of their clients, including me. If they increase the number or length of commercials by much, they will drive many back to their DVR and VCR (or online downloads).
They have an appealing concept working for them right now. They need to decide exactly why it is that they aren't making their original projections. I suspect they just don't have much that people want to watch. Perhaps the general public simply hasn't heard about them (an advertizing problem). Whatever the issue, you only resort to driving away your viewers when you're desperate. If they "over-correct", they will crash and burn.
Does it matter to you at all that the presence of this logic in interpreted code (SQL) is a direct violation of federal law?
But your opinion seems based on scary capital letters.
SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It is an abbreviation of a proper name. It's supposed to be in all caps. You'll only see it in small caps when someone is being informal or lazy.
They're not "scary capital letters" just because you're frightened by them.
I have seen receipt based systems in the U.S., but they were "under glass" systems.
Receipt is probably a misnomer here. Receipt implies something that the client (voter) takes with them. VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail) is a bit clearer, because the purpose is to permit paper based audits, not to allow the voter to prove anything.
There are voting protocols that simultaneously allow:
Verification of the voter by the voting authority
Prevention of double (multiple) voting
Anonymity for the voter to the voting authority
Verification of the voters own vote
No, there aren't.
Some are substantially better than others, but all of them have a blind spot. Either The voter can't really verify his vote, or he can't really trust that his vote remains private.
As a matter of due diligence, I will look up your "David Chaum's blind signature" (I may have already). I'm certain it will have a fatal flaw, as has every system I've examined thus far. It doesn't matter how many people jump up and down in support of their ideologies or how vigorously. Nobody has shown me a secret ballot, end-to-end verifiable voting system. I do not believe one exists. (I would like to be proven wrong, but I don't think anybody can.)
Yeah, I've gotten to the level know when someone asks me the 'wrong' question I now answer "You're not asking me the right question". I used to answer it.
Is "is that sentence grammatically correct?" the correct question to ask?
No, it's not the correct question. The mistake is clearly an insertion typo. The grammar is correct. The word is not.
The correct question may be: "Now that I've pointed out your minute, careless mistake, do you want to try again?"
The Nazis were bigots of the highest order. They were willing to destroy their society, punish and demean entire demographics, lie to instill a false sense of superiority -- all in order to promote their perverse view of reality.
The Nazis were about much more than mass murder. Parallels aren't that hard to come by.
(Normal feminists improve the world. I thought I was extremely clear that I was referencing that "handful", that "vocal minority" which you speak of.)
The 1.5% says to me that institutional sexism is involved. It's far more subtle than overt individual sexist acts, meaning that it's hard for most people to see, especially if they have no direct dealings with one of the few women involved in FOSS.
Let's assume 1.5% (which I doubt very much). This leads the feminazi* and the paranoid to assume there's hidden and subtle bigotry everywhere. If 1.5% is visible, I'd say no more than 5% is hidden. It's a problem, yes, but it's easier to deal with on a case-by-case basis. (7.5% is hardly institutionalized.)
I for one would love to hear from the women who browse Slashdot about their experiences, but I'm more likely to get a response of "There ARE no women on slashdot, tee hee!" which only proves my point.
Slashdot is a bad representation of the OSS crowd. Slashdot is much, much more juvenile. Big OSS projects tend to be moderately professional, or at least emotionally mature. One needs no social or technical maturity to post on Slashdot. Yours was a strawman argument.
* (There's nothing wrong with being feminist. The most vocal feminists have sometimes lost touch with reality. It is for these special people who hurt their cause that I reserve the term "feminazi". I also don't blame the paranoid, as there is hidden bigotry. I don't think there's that much, but it could crop up anywhere and anytime. I also haven't read the original article, and do not apply the derogatory term to him/her. There certainly are some in this thread, though.)
Does critical thinking take that much brain power now days?
Apparently it does, as you don't seem to be able to muster any.
I read all that you wrote, you still fail to mention this magical piece of software that makes it possible to diagnose things like failed capacitors...
I've said plainly now (twice) that no software will pick that up*. I've also said plainly (twice) that certain problems cannot be diagnosed with software.
You sir, fail at reading.
*(Voltage test in BIOS isn't a bad idea, and might be accessible from software, but... now wait for it... "no software can substitute for actually looking at the board.")
That happens. It has been rare in my experience. The chances that all expansion slots on an average modern computer are used has become quite slim. I expect it to become more common as smaller form factors gain popularity.
Tell me a piece of software that'll expose a dying capacitor, please?
???
visible... corrosion in the board, blown capacitors, etc [scorch marks]
Well, no duh (for most of us). And yes, no software can substitute for actually looking at the board.
...
In short: It is possible to diagnose a computer entirely from software. It is also possible to have a problem which must be diagnosed by swapping out hardware.
And they say there's no such thing as a stupid question. Are you a troll, or did you just have a moment of temporary insanity? I get the impression you didn't read what I wrote.
I doubt it. I know that some motherboards monitor voltages (and you can check in bios), but I highly doubt most of them do. Software can only chart what hardware can check.
There is a lot of truth in your post. I think you're mostly right. I also think you might be holding a one-sided argument through much of your post.
Even when they do, it's usually a sign the rest of the board is on it's way out too.
It can be. You have to wonder, why did it fail? Was there a surge? Is the PSU dying and stressing things? Was that particular integrated chip part of a bad batch? Did it get an ESD on installation? Has a controller failed? In the last case, you will usually see additional symptoms. Most integrated devices are hooked into the PCI bus as if they were plugged in. If you plug in a new card, and it works just fine, it probably wasn't the bus controller.
There are plenty of reasons why a board may continue to work for years after an integrated part has failed. I don't see it often, but it has happened.
visible... corrosion in the board, blown capacitors, etc [scorch marks]
Well, no duh (for most of us). And yes, no software can substitute for actually looking at the board.
To be honest, relying purely on a test suite to tell you what's broken will lead to disaster. Only through experience do you get the pointers toward what is actually faulty.
True, true. (experience and knowledge)
Add to this that true diagnosis only comes from swapping out parts
Not true, strictly speaking. Often, swapping out parts is a vital part of diagnosis. It isn't always. For example: if the problem appears to the hardware, swapping it out might mislead you into thinking that the hardware really had failed, or that there's a deeper problem (CPU/MB) while the issue is really software. (Not likely from knoppix as well as windows, but it can happen. Besides, there's still a lot of hardware you can't test from knoppix.)
...and, well, test suites don't look at all like a viable option.
Not true either. Granted, the last step in diagnosis is fixing the problem and observing it disappear. In that sense, installing fresh hardware is often vital. The real reason most test suites aren't viable is because they make no attempt to be thorough. They'll often give a pass to hardware that's clearly failing. A "stress test" may be a good idea, but it's not a real test.
And no, software tests are no pancea in any case.
It all goes back to having test hardware & the knowledge of what certain behaviours in systems are caused by certain faults. After 15 years of working in IT with both hardware & software faults, there's only so much you can do with limited or no test hardware.
True.
Most of the time when you're diagnosing hardware faults on the phone it's an educated guess at best, the only time you truly get a decent diagnosis is when you have the machine with you and can swap parts out.
Very true, but only in part because you can swap out parts. Phone diagnosis is no diagnosis at all. (unless you're diagnosing a PEBKAC problem) You can't do a visual of the machine if it's not in front of you, and it becomes difficult or impossible to run test suites remotely. But this thread really isn't about phone diagnosis.
In short: It is possible to diagnose a computer entirely from software. It is also possible to have a problem which must be diagnosed by swapping out hardware. It depends on the problem, and the quality of the test.
It is a good start, but no more than that. Those tests are certainly not comprehensive (and should be). On the plus side, they often have your specific hardware in mind, and might possibly catch something that other tools wont. (doesn't happen often, but sometimes...)
SMART is also not the end-all of hard drive indicators. A drive can pass SMART, and still be on the way out. I've found (for those familiar with Linux) that a dd from the hd to/dev/null will often spit out errors on a drive that's getting ready to fail. A linear read is far faster than a read/write surface scan, albeit not as thorough. (can be run from knoppix live CD)
Slashdot Mirror
Give me a break.
"Bank", in this context, describes the type of robber. "Robber" isn't the adjective. If anything, "bank" is the adjective. (There's probably another term that applies better here. I'm not an English major.)
If you really want to split hairs over his grammar, you'd interpret it as saying his contractual obligation is to assassinate, spy on, or steal from a bank robber. The actions of the job itself would need to be supplied contextually (and aren't) and would be done to (or for) a bank robber. Examples:
If your job is bank robbery, sure.
If your job is to be a bank robber, sure.
If your job is working as a bank robber, sure.
To rephrase the issue: the job itself isn't a bank robber. A person accomplishing the job is a bank robber. The sentence as originally structured is nonsensical.
I can think of few ways to be more completely ostracized than to attend BYU while promoting the practice of polygamy.
Stop trolling, please.
And maybe you have a bad dimmer, or a bad bulb.
A bad dimmer? Say what? A vast majority of dimmers are very simple pot switches (basically a single resistor). The thing either works or it doesn't.
And he's not the only one having issues with the so-called dimmable CFLs. 5 minutes suggests a bad bulb. 5 days suggests a bad brand. (We can no longer use the dimmer with these CFLs. They just die too quickly.)
I should have said "Christianity's promise of living eternally in the presence of God... there is a difference between that and immortality"
Quite true. Of course there is a subset of Christianity that believes in the literal resurrection of the physical body. Just saying...
And, of course, isn't supported by the 2.4 series kernels that you find in a lot of ARM Linux devices...
Is there a good technical reason for that, or are the systems merely old and the developers lazy? Unless there is a technical reason why 2.4 is being used, it's not the fault of Linux. The fault lies elsewhere.
(disclaimer: I really don't know the answer to the question I asked. If there is a support issue of some kind, you can inform me, but please don't flame.)
I think its a lack of advertisers. They'd probably mix it up if there were more of them.
That may be a contributing factor, but it's no excuse. They have plenty of advertizements, I just have to watch different shows to see them.
Also the only thing they probably have to sell with is the targeting. It's quite possible that Ad Council said ad X should go with show Y.
I really don't know anything about the Ad Council, but targeting is a bad excuse. Let's say I thumb down a commercial. They could search their system for other users who also thumbed that one down, and find an ad that has been ignored or thumbed up. This is a crude system that I've described, but it gets the point across. They could do much, much better targeting, but they're stuck on 1-3 advertisers per show. They're annoying viewers, and not effectively servicing advertizes. They're shooting themselves in the foot.
Five breaks with a single 30 second spot in a 40min program is not nearly as bad as those same five breaks with 20min worth of crap inserted.
Is television really *that* bad where you live?
Yea, it is. Granted, he's rounding down to 40, but that's close enough. Every 40-45 minute episode shown on Hulu airs for a full hour with commercials.
In my country, 5 breaks is what you get when watching a 90 minutes movie, and that's already horribly atmosphere-breaking...
If you identify the climax 1/2 hour in a movie, you'll find that segment runs for a full hour with commercials on broadcast TV. I kid you not. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Yup, I'm not gonna pay for it.
Nor I.
I'm a little surprised they couldn't make it work with the ad model. But then lots of us know how to block ads on hulu.
It's weird that they leave it one the honor system like that. If one commercial fails to load, it really should try another one. If someone has blocked all ads, they shouldn't be able to download content.
I'm not blaming you (or others). It just baffles me that they haven't taken any steps at all to prevent this. I occasionally get the 30 second black screen with white text. All that means is that somebody's server was annoying me, and got itself blacklisted on my system. (To counter this, they really should run their own DNS server and hand out sub-domains to their advertizing partners. If I block *.ads.hulu.com, I shouldn't be allowed content.)
I wouldn't have a problem with ads if they didn't run the same #(*#$*# ad six times in he space of a 40 minute block.
I hear you. Frankly, I'm surprised that adds are tied so darn closely with the specific show you're watching. This results in seeing the same 2 or 3 adds over and over and over... ad infinitum (pun unintended). If I vote down an ad more than once, I don't want to ever see that ad again. There's no reason to do so. They have plenty of other ads I'd be willing to view instead. (They're just unwilling to show them alongside the show I'm watching right now... but they had no problem show me on the last show I saw. *sigh*)
The problem is figuring out what people will put up with. Some people will be willing to put up with more adds or subscription fees. Some won't
Hulu, as it stands now, is reasonable (though their selection is way too small). If they ever ask for a credit card (paypal, etc), they will instantly lose a huge percentage of their clients, including me. If they increase the number or length of commercials by much, they will drive many back to their DVR and VCR (or online downloads).
They have an appealing concept working for them right now. They need to decide exactly why it is that they aren't making their original projections. I suspect they just don't have much that people want to watch. Perhaps the general public simply hasn't heard about them (an advertizing problem). Whatever the issue, you only resort to driving away your viewers when you're desperate. If they "over-correct", they will crash and burn.
Does it matter to you at all that the presence of this logic in interpreted code (SQL) is a direct violation of federal law?
But your opinion seems based on scary capital letters.
SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It is an abbreviation of a proper name. It's supposed to be in all caps. You'll only see it in small caps when someone is being informal or lazy.
They're not "scary capital letters" just because you're frightened by them.
I have seen receipt based systems in the U.S., but they were "under glass" systems.
Receipt is probably a misnomer here. Receipt implies something that the client (voter) takes with them. VVPAT (Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail) is a bit clearer, because the purpose is to permit paper based audits, not to allow the voter to prove anything.
It doesn't surprise me. I've stopped joking on Slashdot without spelling it out. Almost every time I've been modded down, it's because I was joking.
He's playing devil's advocate.
(Quite literally, actually, despite being a joke.)
There are voting protocols that simultaneously allow:
Verification of the voter by the voting authority Prevention of double (multiple) voting
Anonymity for the voter to the voting authority
Verification of the voters own vote
No, there aren't.
Some are substantially better than others, but all of them have a blind spot. Either The voter can't really verify his vote, or he can't really trust that his vote remains private.
As a matter of due diligence, I will look up your "David Chaum's blind signature" (I may have already). I'm certain it will have a fatal flaw, as has every system I've examined thus far. It doesn't matter how many people jump up and down in support of their ideologies or how vigorously. Nobody has shown me a secret ballot, end-to-end verifiable voting system. I do not believe one exists. (I would like to be proven wrong, but I don't think anybody can.)
Yeah, I've gotten to the level know when someone asks me the 'wrong' question I now answer "You're not asking me the right question". I used to answer it.
Is "is that sentence grammatically correct?" the correct question to ask?
No, it's not the correct question. The mistake is clearly an insertion typo. The grammar is correct. The word is not.
The correct question may be: "Now that I've pointed out your minute, careless mistake, do you want to try again?"
Which, in turn, may be smaller than the sum of solution spaces where the collider never gets built in the first place...
The Nazis were bigots of the highest order. They were willing to destroy their society, punish and demean entire demographics, lie to instill a false sense of superiority -- all in order to promote their perverse view of reality.
The Nazis were about much more than mass murder. Parallels aren't that hard to come by.
(Normal feminists improve the world. I thought I was extremely clear that I was referencing that "handful", that "vocal minority" which you speak of.)
The 1.5% says to me that institutional sexism is involved. It's far more subtle than overt individual sexist acts, meaning that it's hard for most people to see, especially if they have no direct dealings with one of the few women involved in FOSS.
Let's assume 1.5% (which I doubt very much). This leads the feminazi* and the paranoid to assume there's hidden and subtle bigotry everywhere. If 1.5% is visible, I'd say no more than 5% is hidden. It's a problem, yes, but it's easier to deal with on a case-by-case basis. (7.5% is hardly institutionalized.)
I for one would love to hear from the women who browse Slashdot about their experiences, but I'm more likely to get a response of "There ARE no women on slashdot, tee hee!" which only proves my point.
Slashdot is a bad representation of the OSS crowd. Slashdot is much, much more juvenile. Big OSS projects tend to be moderately professional, or at least emotionally mature. One needs no social or technical maturity to post on Slashdot. Yours was a strawman argument.
* (There's nothing wrong with being feminist. The most vocal feminists have sometimes lost touch with reality. It is for these special people who hurt their cause that I reserve the term "feminazi". I also don't blame the paranoid, as there is hidden bigotry. I don't think there's that much, but it could crop up anywhere and anytime. I also haven't read the original article, and do not apply the derogatory term to him/her. There certainly are some in this thread, though.)
Oxymoron?
(And yes, I use the Nvidia binaries and appreciate them. I just can't imagine that they couldn't be much better.)
Does critical thinking take that much brain power now days?
Apparently it does, as you don't seem to be able to muster any.
I read all that you wrote, you still fail to mention this magical piece of software that makes it possible to diagnose things like failed capacitors...
I've said plainly now (twice) that no software will pick that up*. I've also said plainly (twice) that certain problems cannot be diagnosed with software.
You sir, fail at reading.
*(Voltage test in BIOS isn't a bad idea, and might be accessible from software, but... now wait for it... "no software can substitute for actually looking at the board.")
That happens. It has been rare in my experience. The chances that all expansion slots on an average modern computer are used has become quite slim. I expect it to become more common as smaller form factors gain popularity.
My opinion, of course.
Tell me a piece of software that'll expose a dying capacitor, please?
???
visible... corrosion in the board, blown capacitors, etc [scorch marks]
Well, no duh (for most of us). And yes, no software can substitute for actually looking at the board.
...
In short: It is possible to diagnose a computer entirely from software. It is also possible to have a problem which must be diagnosed by swapping out hardware.
And they say there's no such thing as a stupid question. Are you a troll, or did you just have a moment of temporary insanity? I get the impression you didn't read what I wrote.
I doubt it. I know that some motherboards monitor voltages (and you can check in bios), but I highly doubt most of them do. Software can only chart what hardware can check.
There is a lot of truth in your post. I think you're mostly right. I also think you might be holding a one-sided argument through much of your post.
Even when they do, it's usually a sign the rest of the board is on it's way out too.
It can be. You have to wonder, why did it fail? Was there a surge? Is the PSU dying and stressing things? Was that particular integrated chip part of a bad batch? Did it get an ESD on installation? Has a controller failed? In the last case, you will usually see additional symptoms. Most integrated devices are hooked into the PCI bus as if they were plugged in. If you plug in a new card, and it works just fine, it probably wasn't the bus controller.
There are plenty of reasons why a board may continue to work for years after an integrated part has failed. I don't see it often, but it has happened.
visible... corrosion in the board, blown capacitors, etc [scorch marks]
Well, no duh (for most of us). And yes, no software can substitute for actually looking at the board.
To be honest, relying purely on a test suite to tell you what's broken will lead to disaster. Only through experience do you get the pointers toward what is actually faulty.
True, true. (experience and knowledge)
Add to this that true diagnosis only comes from swapping out parts
Not true, strictly speaking. Often, swapping out parts is a vital part of diagnosis. It isn't always. For example: if the problem appears to the hardware, swapping it out might mislead you into thinking that the hardware really had failed, or that there's a deeper problem (CPU/MB) while the issue is really software. (Not likely from knoppix as well as windows, but it can happen. Besides, there's still a lot of hardware you can't test from knoppix.)
...and, well, test suites don't look at all like a viable option.
Not true either. Granted, the last step in diagnosis is fixing the problem and observing it disappear. In that sense, installing fresh hardware is often vital. The real reason most test suites aren't viable is because they make no attempt to be thorough. They'll often give a pass to hardware that's clearly failing. A "stress test" may be a good idea, but it's not a real test.
And no, software tests are no pancea in any case.
It all goes back to having test hardware & the knowledge of what certain behaviours in systems are caused by certain faults. After 15 years of working in IT with both hardware & software faults, there's only so much you can do with limited or no test hardware.
True.
Most of the time when you're diagnosing hardware faults on the phone it's an educated guess at best, the only time you truly get a decent diagnosis is when you have the machine with you and can swap parts out.
Very true, but only in part because you can swap out parts. Phone diagnosis is no diagnosis at all. (unless you're diagnosing a PEBKAC problem) You can't do a visual of the machine if it's not in front of you, and it becomes difficult or impossible to run test suites remotely. But this thread really isn't about phone diagnosis.
In short: It is possible to diagnose a computer entirely from software. It is also possible to have a problem which must be diagnosed by swapping out hardware. It depends on the problem, and the quality of the test.
It is a good start, but no more than that. Those tests are certainly not comprehensive (and should be). On the plus side, they often have your specific hardware in mind, and might possibly catch something that other tools wont. (doesn't happen often, but sometimes...)
SMART is also not the end-all of hard drive indicators. A drive can pass SMART, and still be on the way out. I've found (for those familiar with Linux) that a dd from the hd to /dev/null will often spit out errors on a drive that's getting ready to fail. A linear read is far faster than a read/write surface scan, albeit not as thorough. (can be run from knoppix live CD)