I fail to see how this is relevant to the general slashdot content. I see how it would generate clicks and maybe that's the idea. Which leads me to request a more disciplined alternative to slashdot.
Instead of ignoring the facts regarding drugs and basing your beliefs on ignorance, there are a HUGE list of issues that arise as a result of ignoring pharmacology in sport.
*Minor league versions of the sport are then required to take drugs. Impossible! you exclaim. The minors are for preparing/selecting for the majors. Part of your preparation now includes pharmacology because your performance will not vaguely resemble professional level performances without them.
*The system that feeds the minor league system is then required to take drugs. Pharmacology driven performances become the norm. How do you maintain a boundary between pharma/no pharma performances?
Very quickly this will become an issue of children taking performance enhancing drugs, which is already happening. Impossible! Well, then please explain how EXACTLY high school -> college football(u.s.) players balloon in size and weight in less than 1 year? And then the next jump from college to pro creates more impossible body metrics.
If you can't tollerate my complex reasoing, then look at sports pharma as a way to fix every game played. I can pick winners and losers by giving one team pharma X and giving the other pharma Y. I can pick a World Series winner at the beginning of the season just that easily. Impossible you say? Well ask Bjarne Riis about doping his way into a Le Tour victory.
I would like to know what the medical purpose of this pharma is and who is paying for the research. With EPO, there's a legitimate purpose.
This is a no-win situation for the persons assigned to certifying an application. I personally have a very hard time communicating with managers who believe, with an unshakable faith, this is a reasonable solution to a perceived problem. When it blows up, MY head rolls, not theirs. The ages-old "Get IT in my office *now*" blame-shifting game.
The right way to handle this would be to push back hard and explain why this is an epic failure in the making and resources quagmire. That isn't typically a good political solution though.
I would love some advice as to how to change such foolish thinking.
Maybe you've got a good thing going there, but if there have been IT organizational changes recently, this may be a harbinger of things to come.
I'll restate what an AC said. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
When I was a student at a college that is neighbor to a particularly infamous suburb in Los Angeles, *many* of my classmates were repeatedly (legally) stopped and (legally) searched at all hours in this infamous city.
With that said, it's important to think narrowly about my comment. The same procedures would not have been tolerated in affluent Los Angeles, so it can probably be narrowed even further to precinct policies. Even within that precinct, I'm sure there were cops that would not do that kind of thing. Finally this was, in teenager terms, "a long time ago."
This is one desktop? Motherboard has TPM or not? My guess is TPM is alive regardless of the BIOS enable/disable option.
I guess a few more former Microsoft customers will switch, but most will put up with their abuse and this won't end up on anyone's anti-trust radar.
The good news is Vista still requires a great deal of hand-holding. I don't have to worry about running out of desktop support work. **Far** less interesting than high-availability support though.
This *may* be a corner case as most TPM's were shipped in the disabled state back when XP was still shipping.
Instead, how about testing the open source BIOS stack? Most of you have an unused box of recent vintage and I'm sure the projects can use the feedback.
FYI: An open sourced bios is an Achilles heel for Microsoft. Mobo OEM's will **jump** on a Free bios because it saves them money and elminating TPM saves them much more money.
There's no TPM module to establish trust, so I would assume that it would not create this new failure condition. If, it does fail out anyway, common sense would say it is there for the purpose of limiting consumer choice.
Now, that may not actually address the problem. UI fights are intractable with **everyone** having an opinion and more than willing to resort to all kinds of dishonorable methods of getting their way.
The next step of the process should be interviewing as many paying users as possible, face to face, paper and pencil ready. From those interviews see if you can find some similarities and go from there.
I'd mod AC down, but poisonous propaganda like this deserves a rebuttal.
From the link provided So if you are one of these poisonous users who offer no thanks for the time, energy and skill that goes into creating KDE, please go away. Find another project to harass (preferably closed source) as we've had enough of it. That is a totally appropriate response to toxic personalities.
Furthermore, entities that exchange software for money need licensees, better known as users up to a certain point. Entities that write software for their own pleasure have no such need. So, literally speaking, KDE doesn't "need" users.
Finally, KDE 4.1 is great. I'm running it on an old Thinkpad t21 just fine. The packages are in debian experimental, which have no dependency issues if you are running Lenny. Also worth noting, Lenny is **very** reliable for production and desktop use right now.
1. Your supposedly insightful comment is useless blame-shifting. This article is about "fixing" Science education.
2. Until we start laying out our communities sensibly You mean the community that you were lucky enough to buy into? Get out of your damn car, get to know your neighbors and get involved in local politics so YOU can "fix" the fucking neighborhood. Oh wait, maybe that's not the point after all? Maybe the point is to be afraid, do nothing, and bitch about everything else EXCEPT taking some responsibility for yourself, the schools, probably your children, and your neighborhood.
Will someone please explain to me where the **countless** fears manifested in this not-really-insightful-at-all comment come from?
While I agree with the general idea of your referenced article, AC or not, anyone that reads your post should totally disregard your oil price claims. They are not based in any form of economic reality.
Microsoft doesn't want to go scraping the bottom of the price barrel. In many ways, devices like this (real or otherwise) actually improve their bottom line. How? Why?
1. There's no money to be made down there. Moreover Microsoft's OS becomes the Premium OS for your "fancier, but cheaper than a Mac" computer.
2. Waaay down in the bottom of the ultra-low-priced laptop the OS is perceived as cheap. That's totally different than what Microsoft is after.
3. Microsoft has no reason to rush. When OEM's are selling enough, they'll start a project and get all the OEM's off Linux once their slim OS is ready-enough.
4. Market share "speeds and feeds" won't make Linux switchers. Great projects do. Just ask apple how long they've been grinding away at the "switch" campaign. It's taken *years* of OSX to make a dent, not advertising.
This is too easy to stop and will probably suffer an ignominous death.
If it ever gained a little steam outside the right-thinking-patent-repair-club, it's dead in less than 30 seconds.
Fox News and many other runs a blurb something like... "Sources inside the White House have stated that in difficult economic times like this, it's a terrible idea to introduce more regulations that will surely lead to fewer jobs..." See how easy that is?
Sadly, this is the state of discourse in American politics.
BTW, more patent regulations support the terrorists, illegal immigrants and tooth decay.
I laugh now, but it was nothing but funny in the beginning. For the younger crowd on slashdot, parent has wisdom you should take to the bank.
It *is* the college name brand first, with social connections practically as important and GPA way down there. The key after getting in the school is staying in and then making as many friends as humanly possible.
After college, I was really dismayed at the *total* lack of professional and life skills of many of my peers coming from much more well-known (e.g. expensive) schools to whom I had to report.
I screwed myself in the beginning by *not* sinking into overwhelming debt (no Bank of Mom and Dad) and sticking with the well-known school with City College level curriculum in the third year. Don't make that mistake.
I commend your request for facts and very civil tone in questioning my proposals.
Asynchronous" is an online payment. Consider the tranactions "buffered" such that by the time you reach the next access control point, the last transaction has cleared.
I'd easily call it a 10th of a second 'pause' as you swipe - be generous, call it a 20th - that's still 50 microseconds, isnt that enough to transfer a single currency value?
No. The chip inside the card is *very* low-power low-bandwidth chip with no encryption capabilities on its own.
To do a true offline payment, one has to do quite a bit of encryption/decryption functions on-card. Contactless is neither powerful enough or cheap enough to make it viable.
Another tip of the hat to you for sticking to the issue and challenging my side of the story. I wish more people would behave as you do.
A bus transaction takes on the order of a tenth of a second -- you pass the card in front of the reader and hear a beep
therefore there's little chance it's performing an actual offline value transfer. The reason they can do this is that by the time the update to the backend occurs, you haven't gotten off the bus.
The risks of storing value and performing the value transfer offline are too high for mass transit systems.
In fact the damn opengl is so buggy on the laptop-only graphics chip, it uses software rendering and works great.
KDE 4.1 is a huge step forward. The idiots that whined about 4.0 not being up to par do not comprehend the scale of the work involved for 4.x. They may have also gotten used to 3.5+ stability, applications, etc.
I'll might be the first to tell you once you get beyond the eye candy changes, the next layer down appears radically simpler. That's **very** hard to do.
The test is not 4.0, 4.1, 4.x as much as getting the older 3.x apps into the new desktop.
Not true, at least for the Oyster card. It stores a value as well as an ID. There are several thousand buses in London, each with an Oyster reader, and no reliable, fast way to access a central database (of several million cards) from the buses
You don't have any way of know *how* value is stored.
The bus info should not be construed to suggest that the AC is wrong. I'd be interested to know how long one of those bus transactions take. If it's a true offline transaction, it would be pretty slow to complete a bus rider boarding/paying with an oyster card event. Cost-wise, it is cheaper to pay to install a mobile phone modem on the bus than issue transit cards that store value.
Unless you have intimate knowledge of transit card systems, don't leap to the conclusion that the oyster card does offline transactions.
Another chapter in a very cautionary tale regarding workplace politics. This is how playing a good political game from the bottom always ends badly. Very, very badly.
SFPD.... that would allow unauthorized connections to the FiberWAN...
This factoid, bereft of any detail whatsoever permanently casts the Admin as the Black Hat. He manages a WAN so of course there will be undocumented, but approved (by someone somewhere) devices accessing the WAN. But the admin has no method of getting his case heard by the court of public opinion. None.
It fact has yet to be established that the WAN was being held ransom or otherwise. The admin has yet to be heard from!
I'm not arguing for this Admin, because it seems like he committed quite a few wrongs along the way. But this is how fragile one's system admin career actually is.
As long as I can admin it like a Debian distro, I'll take two. They aren't going to get rich at $250 ea., but if their landed cost is below $80 they will be in good shape as long as they have the capital to build some volume.
The only time I've noticed any slow-down issues was when cups was generating certs for itself. Which is to be expected. It serves the printer, scanner, very advanced firewall, trustworthy dhcp serving, webdav file share, the list goes on... This box has VGA out, so I can make it a mythtv head.
all it takes to run Windows is to pop in the disk and let it install
This little bit of folklore deserves to die.
1. Got a system restore disk? (Not an OEM-style installer!) Then sure, many minutes later your "my documents" is gone, but you are pretty much back up to day-1 status.
2. Got an OEM installer disk? How many of those disks do not include the drivers for devices like, ohhh your *ethernet* adapter? That is the purest soul-sucking time sink ever.
Apple's installer is pretty great for this reason. I seem to recall it kept my wife's home files intact.
Even if I had to pay $200 for it I'd still use it.
You paid at least $100 more and that's fine. Everyone has preferences. But that's much different than using heresay to justify your preferences.
Please recognize that you are promoting higher computing costs worldwide, limiting employment and promoting numerous constraints in basic communication and the technology industry.
Slashdot Mirror
I fail to see how this is relevant to the general slashdot content. I see how it would generate clicks and maybe that's the idea. Which leads me to request a more disciplined alternative to slashdot.
Instead of ignoring the facts regarding drugs and basing your beliefs on ignorance, there are a HUGE list of issues that arise as a result of ignoring pharmacology in sport.
*Minor league versions of the sport are then required to take drugs. Impossible! you exclaim. The minors are for preparing/selecting for the majors. Part of your preparation now includes pharmacology because your performance will not vaguely resemble professional level performances without them.
*The system that feeds the minor league system is then required to take drugs. Pharmacology driven performances become the norm. How do you maintain a boundary between pharma/no pharma performances?
Very quickly this will become an issue of children taking performance enhancing drugs, which is already happening. Impossible! Well, then please explain how EXACTLY high school -> college football(u.s.) players balloon in size and weight in less than 1 year? And then the next jump from college to pro creates more impossible body metrics.
If you can't tollerate my complex reasoing, then look at sports pharma as a way to fix every game played. I can pick winners and losers by giving one team pharma X and giving the other pharma Y. I can pick a World Series winner at the beginning of the season just that easily. Impossible you say? Well ask Bjarne Riis about doping his way into a Le Tour victory.
I would like to know what the medical purpose of this pharma is and who is paying for the research. With EPO, there's a legitimate purpose.
This is a no-win situation for the persons assigned to certifying an application. I personally have a very hard time communicating with managers who believe, with an unshakable faith, this is a reasonable solution to a perceived problem. When it blows up, MY head rolls, not theirs. The ages-old "Get IT in my office *now*" blame-shifting game.
The right way to handle this would be to push back hard and explain why this is an epic failure in the making and resources quagmire. That isn't typically a good political solution though.
I would love some advice as to how to change such foolish thinking.
Maybe you've got a good thing going there, but if there have been IT organizational changes recently, this may be a harbinger of things to come.
Pick one.
I'll restate what an AC said. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
When I was a student at a college that is neighbor to a particularly infamous suburb in Los Angeles, *many* of my classmates were repeatedly (legally) stopped and (legally) searched at all hours in this infamous city.
With that said, it's important to think narrowly about my comment. The same procedures would not have been tolerated in affluent Los Angeles, so it can probably be narrowed even further to precinct policies. Even within that precinct, I'm sure there were cops that would not do that kind of thing. Finally this was, in teenager terms, "a long time ago."
This is one desktop? Motherboard has TPM or not? My guess is TPM is alive regardless of the BIOS enable/disable option.
I guess a few more former Microsoft customers will switch, but most will put up with their abuse and this won't end up on anyone's anti-trust radar.
The good news is Vista still requires a great deal of hand-holding. I don't have to worry about running out of desktop support work. **Far** less interesting than high-availability support though.
This *may* be a corner case as most TPM's were shipped in the disabled state back when XP was still shipping.
Instead, how about testing the open source BIOS stack? Most of you have an unused box of recent vintage and I'm sure the projects can use the feedback.
FYI: An open sourced bios is an Achilles heel for Microsoft. Mobo OEM's will **jump** on a Free bios because it saves them money and elminating TPM saves them much more money.
Get involved!!
http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot
http://openbios.info/Welcome_to_OpenBIOS
There's no TPM module to establish trust, so I would assume that it would not create this new failure condition. If, it does fail out anyway, common sense would say it is there for the purpose of limiting consumer choice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_prototyping
Now, that may not actually address the problem. UI fights are intractable with **everyone** having an opinion and more than willing to resort to all kinds of dishonorable methods of getting their way.
The next step of the process should be interviewing as many paying users as possible, face to face, paper and pencil ready. From those interviews see if you can find some similarities and go from there.
I'd mod AC down, but poisonous propaganda like this deserves a rebuttal.
From the link provided So if you are one of these poisonous users who offer no thanks for the time, energy and skill that goes into creating KDE, please go away. Find another project to harass (preferably closed source) as we've had enough of it. That is a totally appropriate response to toxic personalities.
Furthermore, entities that exchange software for money need licensees, better known as users up to a certain point. Entities that write software for their own pleasure have no such need. So, literally speaking, KDE doesn't "need" users.
Finally, KDE 4.1 is great. I'm running it on an old Thinkpad t21 just fine. The packages are in debian experimental, which have no dependency issues if you are running Lenny. Also worth noting, Lenny is **very** reliable for production and desktop use right now.
1. Your supposedly insightful comment is useless blame-shifting. This article is about "fixing" Science education.
2. Until we start laying out our communities sensibly You mean the community that you were lucky enough to buy into? Get out of your damn car, get to know your neighbors and get involved in local politics so YOU can "fix" the fucking neighborhood. Oh wait, maybe that's not the point after all? Maybe the point is to be afraid, do nothing, and bitch about everything else EXCEPT taking some responsibility for yourself, the schools, probably your children, and your neighborhood.
Will someone please explain to me where the **countless** fears manifested in this not-really-insightful-at-all comment come from?
While I agree with the general idea of your referenced article, AC or not, anyone that reads your post should totally disregard your oil price claims. They are not based in any form of economic reality.
Reconsider the end of Microsoft for a minute.
Microsoft doesn't want to go scraping the bottom of the price barrel. In many ways, devices like this (real or otherwise) actually improve their bottom line. How? Why?
1. There's no money to be made down there. Moreover Microsoft's OS becomes the Premium OS for your "fancier, but cheaper than a Mac" computer.
2. Waaay down in the bottom of the ultra-low-priced laptop the OS is perceived as cheap. That's totally different than what Microsoft is after.
3. Microsoft has no reason to rush. When OEM's are selling enough, they'll start a project and get all the OEM's off Linux once their slim OS is ready-enough.
4. Market share "speeds and feeds" won't make Linux switchers. Great projects do. Just ask apple how long they've been grinding away at the "switch" campaign. It's taken *years* of OSX to make a dent, not advertising.
This is too easy to stop and will probably suffer an ignominous death.
If it ever gained a little steam outside the right-thinking-patent-repair-club, it's dead in less than 30 seconds.
Fox News and many other runs a blurb something like... "Sources inside the White House have stated that in difficult economic times like this, it's a terrible idea to introduce more regulations that will surely lead to fewer jobs..." See how easy that is?
Sadly, this is the state of discourse in American politics.
BTW, more patent regulations support the terrorists, illegal immigrants and tooth decay.
I laugh now, but it was nothing but funny in the beginning. For the younger crowd on slashdot, parent has wisdom you should take to the bank.
It *is* the college name brand first, with social connections practically as important and GPA way down there. The key after getting in the school is staying in and then making as many friends as humanly possible.
After college, I was really dismayed at the *total* lack of professional and life skills of many of my peers coming from much more well-known (e.g. expensive) schools to whom I had to report.
I screwed myself in the beginning by *not* sinking into overwhelming debt (no Bank of Mom and Dad) and sticking with the well-known school with City College level curriculum in the third year. Don't make that mistake.
I commend your request for facts and very civil tone in questioning my proposals.
Asynchronous" is an online payment. Consider the tranactions "buffered" such that by the time you reach the next access control point, the last transaction has cleared.
I'd easily call it a 10th of a second 'pause' as you swipe - be generous, call it a 20th - that's still 50 microseconds, isnt that enough to transfer a single currency value?
No. The chip inside the card is *very* low-power low-bandwidth chip with no encryption capabilities on its own.
To do a true offline payment, one has to do quite a bit of encryption/decryption functions on-card. Contactless is neither powerful enough or cheap enough to make it viable.
Another tip of the hat to you for sticking to the issue and challenging my side of the story. I wish more people would behave as you do.
A bus transaction takes on the order of a tenth of a second -- you pass the card in front of the reader and hear a beep
therefore there's little chance it's performing an actual offline value transfer. The reason they can do this is that by the time the update to the backend occurs, you haven't gotten off the bus.
The risks of storing value and performing the value transfer offline are too high for mass transit systems.
I've got a Thinkpad t21 running kde4.1 just fine.
In fact the damn opengl is so buggy on the laptop-only graphics chip, it uses software rendering and works great.
KDE 4.1 is a huge step forward. The idiots that whined about 4.0 not being up to par do not comprehend the scale of the work involved for 4.x. They may have also gotten used to 3.5+ stability, applications, etc.
I'll might be the first to tell you once you get beyond the eye candy changes, the next layer down appears radically simpler. That's **very** hard to do.
The test is not 4.0, 4.1, 4.x as much as getting the older 3.x apps into the new desktop.
Because each municipality generally tends to set up their own system because their transit systems are totally different.
There is no "one size fits all" transit system.
Not true, at least for the Oyster card. It stores a value as well as an ID. There are several thousand buses in London, each with an Oyster reader, and no reliable, fast way to access a central database (of several million cards) from the buses
You don't have any way of know *how* value is stored.
The bus info should not be construed to suggest that the AC is wrong. I'd be interested to know how long one of those bus transactions take. If it's a true offline transaction, it would be pretty slow to complete a bus rider boarding/paying with an oyster card event. Cost-wise, it is cheaper to pay to install a mobile phone modem on the bus than issue transit cards that store value.
Unless you have intimate knowledge of transit card systems, don't leap to the conclusion that the oyster card does offline transactions.
Another chapter in a very cautionary tale regarding workplace politics. This is how playing a good political game from the bottom always ends badly. Very, very badly.
SFPD .... that would allow unauthorized connections to the FiberWAN ...
This factoid, bereft of any detail whatsoever permanently casts the Admin as the Black Hat. He manages a WAN so of course there will be undocumented, but approved (by someone somewhere) devices accessing the WAN. But the admin has no method of getting his case heard by the court of public opinion. None.
It fact has yet to be established that the WAN was being held ransom or otherwise. The admin has yet to be heard from!
I'm not arguing for this Admin, because it seems like he committed quite a few wrongs along the way. But this is how fragile one's system admin career actually is.
As long as I can admin it like a Debian distro, I'll take two. They aren't going to get rich at $250 ea., but if their landed cost is below $80 they will be in good shape as long as they have the capital to build some volume.
I run a now-discontinued nslu2 as a home network hub, arm-powered and ***plenty*** fast. http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/
The only time I've noticed any slow-down issues was when cups was generating certs for itself. Which is to be expected. It serves the printer, scanner, very advanced firewall, trustworthy dhcp serving, webdav file share, the list goes on... This box has VGA out, so I can make it a mythtv head.
all it takes to run Windows is to pop in the disk and let it install
This little bit of folklore deserves to die.
1. Got a system restore disk? (Not an OEM-style installer!) Then sure, many minutes later your "my documents" is gone, but you are pretty much back up to day-1 status.
2. Got an OEM installer disk? How many of those disks do not include the drivers for devices like, ohhh your *ethernet* adapter? That is the purest soul-sucking time sink ever.
Apple's installer is pretty great for this reason. I seem to recall it kept my wife's home files intact.
Even if I had to pay $200 for it I'd still use it.
You paid at least $100 more and that's fine. Everyone has preferences. But that's much different than using heresay to justify your preferences.
Please recognize that you are promoting higher computing costs worldwide, limiting employment and promoting numerous constraints in basic communication and the technology industry.
$50 is a moot number because consumers are not volume buyers. Let's check the facts.
Dell Inspiron 1420, Ubuntu,$449
Dell Inspiron 1420, Vista Home: $649
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspnnb_1420?c=us&l=en&cs=19l=en&s=dhs (starting price model)
Sooo... Facts prove my point. Microsoft is more expensive. Please adjust your beliefs to better reflect reality.